Dante's lyric redemption: eros, salvation, vernacular tradition 9780198753964, 0198753969

Table of contents :
PART ONE: DANTE'S POETICS OF INTEGRATION
PART TWO: NEGOTIATING PRECURSORS

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OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee K. M. KOHL M. L. MCLAUGHLIN R. A. G. PEARSON M. J. THACKER W. WILLIAMS A. KAHN

SHERINGHAM

Dante’s Lyric Redemption Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition T R I S T A N KA Y

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Tristan Kay 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942292 ISBN 978–0–19–875396–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements My love for Dante was first kindled as an undergraduate at the University of Leeds, especially thanks to the excellent teaching of Claire Honess, who subsequently supervised my MA dissertation at Leeds on Dante and the troubadours. Manuele ‘Lele’ Gragnolati at the University of Oxford oversaw the doctoral thesis from which this book developed. I am enormously grateful to Lele, who was an inspiring supervisor and remains a valuable interlocutor and friend. I am indebted to the AHRC for funding my postgraduate study in both Leeds and Oxford, as well as to The Queen’s College, Oxford, who awarded me a Hastings Senior Scholarship for my time there. I was extremely fortunate to receive a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth College from 2010–2012 and wish to thank the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth for hosting me during the period of that Fellowship. A number of people, over a good number of years, have read and commented on earlier versions of this book and the thesis that preceded it. In addition to Lele and Claire, I especially wish to thank Zygmunt Barański, David Bowe, Rhiannon Daniels, Nicola Gardini, Simon Gilson, Elena Lombardi, Martin McLaughlin, and Francesca Southerden. Many other colleagues have provided valuable insights and suggestions in conversation and in response to conference papers and seminars. At Oxford University Press I would like to thank Jacqueline Baker, Rachel Platt, Timothy Beck, Saranya Jayakumar, and Denise Bannerman for their help and guidance during the publication process. My thanks also go to the two anonymous readers, whose detailed and thoughtful reports helped me to improve the manuscript. For their support and collegiality, I am grateful to my colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol, and especially to my fellow Italianists: Charles Burdett, Rhiannon Daniels, John Foot, Ruth Glynn, and Catherine O’Rawe. I also wish to thank my students at Bristol, and those at Oxford and Dartmouth before them, whose enthusiastic engagement with the questions explored in this book has been continually energizing. Away from academia, my thanks go to my parents, Margaret and Maurice, for their unfailing support; to my three brothers, Jon, Dom,

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and Oli, along with their respective families; and to Catherine Berry, for her love, companionship, and encouragement. Finally, I am writing these Acknowledgements just a few days before my maternal grandmother, Alice, celebrates her one-hundredth birthday. I dedicate this book to her remarkable centenary.

Contents Editions Followed and Abbreviations

Introduction

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PART I. DANTE’S POETICS OF INTEGRATION 1. Love, Authority, and Vernacular Poetry

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2. Dante’s Commedia between Dualism and Integration

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PART II. NEGOTIATING PRECURSORS 3. Guittone d’Arezzo

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4. Arnaut Daniel

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5. Folco of Marseilles

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Conclusion Bibliography Index

247 249 271

Editions Followed and Abbreviations Unless otherwise stated, I use the following editions of Dante’s works and refer to them with the abbreviations indicated: Commedia La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by G. Petrocchi, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994) Op. min. Opere minori, 2 vols (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1979) Conv. Convivio, ed. by F. B. Ageno, 3 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995) DVE De vulgari eloquentia, ed. by P. V. Mengaldo, in Op. min., II, 1–237 Inf. Inferno, in Petrocchi, ed., Commedia Purg. Purgatorio, in Petrocchi, ed., Commedia Par. Paradiso, in Petrocchi, ed., Commedia Rime Rime, ed. by G. Contini, in Op. min., I, i, 249–552 VN Vita nuova, ed. by D. De Robertis, in Op. min., I, i, 1–247 Abbreviations are also used for the following reference works and tools: DDP Dartmouth Dante Project : a database of Dante commentaries from the Middle Ages to the present day DE R. Lansing, ed., Dante Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 2000) ED U. Bosco, ed., Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978) And for the following journals: DS Dante Studies IS Italian Studies MLN Modern Language Notes PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America SD Studi danteschi Translations of Dante’s works are taken from the following editions unless otherwise indicated: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. and with a commentary by R. Hollander, trans. by R. and J. Hollander, 3 vols (New York: Doubleday, 2000–2007) Dante Alighieri, The Banquet, ed. and trans. by R. Lansing (New York: Garland, 1998) Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed., trans., and with a commentary by K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)

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Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by S. Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, trans. by M. Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Translations from critical works in languages other than English are my own unless otherwise stated.

Introduction Beatrice, idest theologia.1 For the Commedia’s early commentators, the figure of Beatrice posed a problem. A figure so profoundly associated with the erotic as well as the salvific in Dante’s poetic history was far from a straightforward choice as his guide through Paradise. It is little wonder, therefore, that exegetes reduced her to a symbol of theology, her historical reality all but exorcized from their exposition of the poem. Such an interpretation of Beatrice framed the poem in terms of normative theological categories. It sanitized the text, rendered its author morally unimpeachable, and accordingly safeguarded his authority. The line between Dante the love poet and the poet-theologian of the Commedia could be cast as clearly demarcated and impermeable, with earthly love and love poetry renounced, along with the meretricious Francesca da Rimini, in Inferno V. Such binaries, while to some degree problematized in recent times, have remained persistent, implicitly or explicitly, in many parts of the critical tradition. This book attempts to nuance these oppositions and argues that an account of Dante’s poetic itinerary that posits a stark division between earthly and divine love, and between the secular lyric poet and the Christian auctor, does little justice to his highly distinctive and often polemical handling of these categories. In recent times, Dante scholars have emphasized what Guy Raffa describes as the poet’s ‘unsurpassed ability, at once exhilarating and exasperating, to “have it both ways” on issues that normally cry out for a definitive, either/or “solution”’.2 A defining characteristic of his writing, 1 ‘Beatrice, that is Theology’. DDP: Benvenuto da Imola, note to Inf. II, 70–72. The same formulation is used by Dante’s son Pietro (see for example DDP: Pietro Alighieri [1], note to Purg. XXX, 16–18). Introducing Beatrice in Inferno II, Dante’s fourteenth-century commentators almost invariably and immediately interpret her ‘sub allegoria et typo theologie’ [as an allegory and type of theology] (DDP: Pietro Alighieri [2], note to Inf. II 51–102). Her historical identity is seldom, and only ever momentarily, evoked. An exception is Boccaccio, who refers in more detail than other commentators to Dante’s Vita nova and his love for Beatrice as a boy in Florence; see DDP: Giovanni Boccaccio, note to Inf. II, 57. 2 G. Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 7.

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especially in the Commedia, is its attempt to overcome cultural tensions and dialectics that compromised his ambitions as a writer and indeed conflicted with his very understanding of reality.3 The question of love is surely one of the most integral and intriguing of these dialectics, both in Dante’s poetry and in late medieval culture more broadly. Earthly and divine love, or at least the language used to describe them, enjoyed an increasingly complex and fluid relationship in a number of late medieval cultural discourses, both religious and secular, yet remained inimical according to the most influential theological voices of the period. Thus, a fundamental source of tension for Dante and the vernacular poets of his time, especially those who meditated seriously upon the moral and spiritual implications of their writing, was the intimate association that continued to exist between poetry in the mother tongue and the experience of love. The composition of vernacular verse was, indeed, often predicated upon the poet’s submission to Amor. Dante’s own retention of the historical donna as the fulcrum of his poetics cannot but problematize his self-fashioning as ‘sacred’ author, yet remains integral to his operation. The origins, motivations, and implications of this unlikely erotic commitment underpin this book. Its wider aims are essentially twofold: Part I (‘Dante’s Poetics of Integration’) contextualizes, traces, and accounts for this erotic commitment from the minor works to the Commedia, and argues its importance in understanding Dante’s poetics; Part II (‘Negotiating Precursors’) examines how this matter is at stake in Dante’s handling of his lyric predecessors at different junctures in his poetic career, and ultimately lies at the heart of his claims to pre-eminence as a vernacular author. Chapter 1, ‘Love, Authority, and Vernacular Poetry’, seeks to contextualize what I term Dante’s ‘Poetics of Integration’—his attempts, especially in the Commedia, to overcome normative oppositions in formulating a uniquely redemptive vernacular poetics, one oriented towards the eternal while rooted in Dante’s affective, and indeed erotic, past. It focuses on three interrelated tensions central to Dante’s poetry and wider culture. The opening section, ‘Eros and Spirituality’, explores the interplay and opposition between earthly and divine forms of love in the Middle Ages, and considers how this context informs Dante’s attempts to valorize love poetry in his Vita nova and Convivio. This matter of love cannot, however, be considered discretely, but is entangled with other cultural questions. 3 On Dante’s ‘non-dualistic’ understanding of the relationship between the world and the ground of its being, see C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Introduction

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Thus, in the second section, ‘Authority and Subjectivity’, again focusing on the minor works, I consider how Dante’s loyalty to love poetry, with its strong subjective charge, intersects with his attempts to appropriate for his writing a depersonalized form of cultural authority, ordinarily associated with a small number of classical and biblical texts written in Latin. The relationship between authority and subjectivity feeds into the third section, ‘Vernacular and Latin’, where I explore some challenges associated with Dante’s commitment to the vernacular—a form of language that not only occupied a lower cultural status than Latin, but that Dante comes to regard as indissociable from desire and embodied selfhood. Across these three sections I trace Dante’s attempts in the minor works to harmonize eros and spirituality, vernacular subjectivity and Latin authority, and consider some of the tensions that emerge from these endeavours. The chapter’s treatment of overlapping discourses (love, authority, language) offers a framework for approaching and accounting for Dante’s often radical handling of questions of love. Chapter 2, ‘Dante’s Commedia between Dualism and Integration’, uses Chapter 1 as its basis in considering the Commedia’s response to this cluster of interrelated tensions. While the poem at times endorses a dualistic framework of love, denigrating earthly desires and affections, what emerges in the pilgrim’s love for Beatrice is the formulation of a uniquely synthetic love that harmonizes spiritual, affective, and intellective impulses. I engage with critical debates surrounding the value ascribed to earthly love by Dante in the Commedia, from Inferno V to the Paradiso, and problematize readings that postulate an entirely antagonistic relationship between the poem and the love lyric. I contend that Dante in the Commedia is not concerned with simply severing himself from the secular lyric tradition in espousing ethical, political, and religious content, but rather that he seeks to transcend a dualistic model of conversion, uniquely integrating erotic and spiritual commitment. This synthesis, realized through the figure of Beatrice, centrally and powerfully informs his claims to supremacy as a vernacular poet. This question of poetic supremacy is the principal concern of the second part of the book, where I focus upon Dante’s careful negotiation, evaluation, and representation of three vernacular writers: the Italian poet Guittone d’Arezzo and the Occitan troubadours Arnaut Daniel and Folco of Marseilles. It is well known that Dante’s treatment of poets, whether as intertextual presences or as characters in the Commedia, serves as a key site for self-definition and self-reflection.4 Critics have shown how his 4 As Zygmunt Barański writes, the poet was ‘not so much interested in presenting balanced critical assessments of his fellow writers as he was intent on using them to define his own literary identity’: ‘Dolce stil novo’, in DE, pp. 308–11 (p. 310).

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engagement with and representation of other writers, both classical and medieval, invariably seeks to draw attention to the unprecedented artistic and especially spiritual accomplishments of his poetry, whether in his Christianization of the pagan epic or in his liberation from a destructive form of courtly love.5 Through a close reading of Dante’s engagement with these lyric predecessors, I aim to substantiate the argument proposed in the first part of the book, highlighting Dante’s careful departure from a dualistic model of conversion and his redemption, rather than rejection, of the love lyric. These poetic encounters will take us, moreover, to different moments in his oeuvre, from the Vita nova to the Convivio, the moral canzoni to the ‘rime petrose’, the De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia. My decision to focus on these three particular writers may at first seem counter-intuitive; after all, other vernacular poets—most obviously Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Gunizzelli, and Cino da Pistoia—occupy more prominent roles in Dante’s writing and biography. There are, however, two main motivations for my focus on this particular selection of writers. First, all three bring to light clearly and explicitly the issues central to my reading of Dante in this book. That is, all serve as important points of reference, as models and anti-models, in Dante’s gradual formulation of what Regina Psaki terms a ‘redeemed eroticism’.6 They reaffirm an opposition between erotic and spiritual commitment that Dante’s poetry seeks to subvert, whether in the stark conversions exhibited by Guittone and Folco, which plot eros and spirituality against one another, or in the intense but exclusively carnal eros that dominates the lyrics of Arnaut.7 5 See for example T. Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); G. Contini, ‘Dante come personaggiopoeta della Commedia’, in Un’idea di Dante: saggi danteschi (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 33–62; C. Giunta, La poesia italiana nell’età di Dante: la linea Bonagiunta-Guinizzelli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998); R. Hollander, Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella ‘Commedia’ (Florence: Olschki, 1983); The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by R. Jacoff and J. T. Schnapp (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1991); Dante e la ‘bella scola’ della poesia: autorità e sfida poetica, ed. by A. Iannucci (Ravenna: Longo, 1993); M. Picone, ‘Vita Nuova’ e tradizione romanza (Padua: Liviana: 1979); ‘Dante and the Classics’, in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by A. Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 51–73; W. Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 6 See F. R. Psaki, ‘Love for Beatrice: Transcending Contradiction in the Paradiso’, in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. by T. Barolini and H. W. Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 115–30 (p. 119). 7 The other troubadours who feature prominently in Dante’s work, Bertran de Born, Sordello, and Giraut de Bornelh, all pertain to different discourses. Bertran is cited in the De vulgari eloquentia and represented in Inferno XXVIII as a divisive war poet, while Sordello, who appears in Purgatorio VI, is associated with political poetry. Giraut, who will be an important point of reference in my discussions of Guittone and Arnaut, is cited in the De vulgari eloquentia as a pre-eminent ethical poet.

Introduction

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Second, for all their importance in Dante’s oeuvre, the poets under consideration here have in recent years been less studied than others such as Cavalcanti and Guinizzelli. The relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti, in particular, has so fixated academic attention in recent years that it has almost become a field of scholarship unto itself.8 My decision not to focus on Cavalcanti and Guinizzelli is therefore a conscious and, I would suggest, a liberating one. By disengaging the rich and multifaceted subject of Dante’s relationship to his lyric heritage from a rather narrow series of issues that have monopolized critical debate in recent times, we are able to consider some of his more neglected interlocutors and emphasize the breadth of vernacular poets in dialogue with whom he refines his poetics and literary identity. Each chapter, then, offers an opportunity for a sustained and focused analysis, substantiating the central arguments of the book while also reasserting and re-evaluating the importance of the poet in question and his relationship to Dante. Chapter 3 considers Guittone d’Arezzo, a pivotal figure in the Italian Duecento whose critical reception has been greatly conditioned by Dante’s hostile attitude towards him. The chapter problematizes a dominant critical perspective that attributes Dante’s hostility, first, to a stylistic distaste owing to Guittone’s dense and convoluted rhetoric, and, second, to an ‘anxiety of influence’ owing to the fact that Guittone’s movement from amatory to ethical and political poetry can be seen to foreshadow Dante’s own poetic development.9 While the importance of these two matters is not to be ignored, existing approaches to Dante’s anti-guittonismo underplay an enduring dissent between the poets in terms of their handling of love. I argue in this chapter that far from tacitly following Guittone’s conversionary paradigm, Dante rejects it, defining his own poetics of integration in opposition to the Aretine’s stark separation of vernacular poetry and desire. I begin by offering a comparative reading of Dante’s Vita nova and Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ of eighty-six courtly sonnets with a view to highlighting the polemical presence of Guittone in the libello and the poets’ radically different responses to the 8 For recent book-length studies of the two poets, see: M. Corti, Scritti su Cavalcanti: La felicità mentale, Percorsi dell’invenzione e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 2004); A. Gagliardi, Guido Cavalcanti e Dante: una questione d’amore (Catanzaro: Pullano, 1997); A. Gessani, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti e l’amoroso regno (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2004); G. Gorni, Dante e il suo primo amico (Rome: Aracne, 2009); E. Malato, Dante e Guido Cavalcanti: il dissidio per la ‘Vita nuova’ e il ‘disdegno’ di Guido (Rome: Salerno, 2004); G. Noemi, L’ombra di Cavalcanti e Dante (Rome: L’asino d’oro, 2011); G. Sasso, Dante, Guido e Francesca (Rome: Viella, 2008). A vast number of essays on the two poets have been published during the same period. 9 Extensive bibliography on Guittone, Arnaut, and Folco can be found in the chapters dedicated to the three poets.

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perceived moral limitations of conventional love poetry.10 While these collections of love poetry emerge as ideologically opposed, the second part of the chapter shows how the poets’ respective ethical lyrics display a more ambivalent relationship. Dante’s moral poetry carefully negotiates the stark conversionary paradigm of ‘Fra Guittone’, and affinities as well as tensions emerge between the two poets during the middle years of Dante’s poetic career. Finally, the Commedia is where Dante breaks most decisively from the Guittonian model that he has attended to throughout his lyric corpus. In its integration of moral, political, and amatory themes, and its fresh endorsement of love as the privileged source of vernacular poetry, Dante forges a radically new path for the spiritually committed vernacular poet. The chapter argues that the poem’s integrative handling of love is not only un-Guittonian in nature but specifically anti-Guittonian in its conception. Thus, far from anticipating Dante’s moral-poetic trajectory, the Aretine serves as a crucial anti-model in Dante’s formulation of a redeemed lyric praxis. Chapter 4 considers Dante’s engagement with Arnaut Daniel, a poet whose commitment to love, in contrast with Guittone’s, is unflinching. Given the problematic moral status of conventional courtly poetry throughout Dante’s oeuvre, we might expect his evaluation of Arnaut to be as disapproving as his appraisal of Guittone, who at least confronted the moral difficulties inherent in the lyric tradition. Dante’s assessment of Arnaut is, however, far more positive. This chapter seeks to challenge the entrenched critical opinion that attributes Dante’s well-known esteem for Arnaut entirely to the troubadour’s technical prowess. Instead, through close readings of both Arnaut’s poetry and Dante’s references to him, it argues that the troubadour’s poetry is seen to embody the nucleus of vernacular language, desire, and subjectivity that Dante saw as the essence of lyric poetry in the mother tongue, and that it is Arnaut’s standing as a paradigmatic poet of erotic love—and not simply as an indulgent master of poetic form—that qualifies him as the Commedia’s ‘miglior fabbro’ [finest craftsman] (Purg. XXVI, 117).11 The chapter begins by calling into question the emphasis placed by critics upon Arnaut’s status as the leading 10 I use the label ‘canzoniere’ applied to Guittone’s eighty-six erotic sonnets (as compiled in the Laurenziano Rediano 9 manuscript) by Lino Leonardi. See Guittone d’Arezzo, Canzoniere: i sonetti d’amore del codice laurenziano, ed. by L. Leonardi (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). 11 The lack of an article preceding the adjective miglior makes it uncertain whether Arnaut is ‘a finer’ craftsman (than the speaker Guinizzelli) or ‘the finest’ of all. I believe, however, that the pre-eminence implied two lines later (‘soverchiò tutti’ [overcame them all]: line 119, my emphasis) makes the latter more probable. Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation of the Commedia, which I have followed throughout unless stated, uses ‘the finer’.

Introduction

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poet of a hermetic ‘school’ of troubadour poetry known as the trobar clus—a term indelibly associated with Arnaut in critical literature but never used by the poet himself. Rather than seeing Arnaut as conforming to a school of hermetic poetry, I argue that it is more productive to highlight his very pronounced departure from all pre-existing styles and his attempts to ground his poetics in his own unique desire and selfhood. In order to substantiate this view, I work with four of Arnaut’s lyrics (all cited by Dante in his De vulgari eloquentia) and highlight the intimate bond that emerges between Arnaut’s unusual style and his singular experience of love. The influence of Arnaut upon Dante is seen most clearly in the Florentine’s bravura lyric sequence the ‘rime petrose’. I question the view that Arnaut’s influence on the poems should be restricted to their formal and lexical properties, and instead argue that the importance of his legacy concerns Dante’s endeavour to break the shackles that compromised and diluted his expressive capacity and thereby created a disjunction between poetry and desire. Finally, I reconsider the conventional interpretation of Arnaut’s appearance in Purgatorio XXVI—that is, as a critique of the troubadour’s obscurantism and preoccupation with technical prowess. While Dante identifies the moral limitations of the troubadour’s poetry, whose focus, restricted to earthly love, accounts for his presence among the penitent lustful, he nonetheless privileges the troubadour’s erotic poetry over the non-erotic moral verse of Guittone and Giraut de Bornelh and intimates the presence of an (anti-Guittonian) continuum between the lyric tradition and the ‘sacred’ project upon which he now embarks. Finally, Chapter 5 explores Dante’s treatment of Folco of Marseilles, who appears in the Paradiso’s Heaven of Venus. Like Guittone, Folco eventually rejected love poetry and became an influential participant in the Albigensian Crusades, penning two surviving crusade poems. While Folco has often been omitted from considerations of Dante’s reflection upon love poetry in the Commedia, this chapter shows him to be crucially implicated. Despite Folco’s salvation on account of his surpassing of courtly love, I argue that Dante implicitly undermines the troubadour’s achievements, positioning him as another love poet unable to transcend the dualistic ideology of the pre-existing lyric tradition and instead positing an insoluble tension between eros and spirituality. I begin by considering how critics have variously responded to the presence of Folco in Paradise in terms of his poetic importance and his prefiguration or otherwise of Dante’s own path to God. To shed light on these questions I turn to the troubadour’s largely ignored crusade poetry, which is shown to resonate both in Dante’s portrayal of the troubadour in the Paradiso and in Guittone’s moral verse. Indeed, while critics have drawn parallels

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between Folco and Dante as ‘former’ love poets who have turned to God, I argue instead that Folco is best identified as a precursor to Guittone, whose binary handling of the relationship between eros and spirituality Dante aims not to follow, but to transcend. Folco’s failure to reconcile love poetry and religious fervor, like Guittone’s, contrasts sharply with the integrative emphasis of Dante’s own poetry. Rather than hinting at Dante’s own synthesis of eros and spirituality, then, I argue that Dante implicates Folco in a critique of a limited courtly ideology that can be traced through all three cantiche. However, the handling of love associated with the Commedia, which I believe crucially distinguishes Dante from Folco and Guittone, is not representative of Dante’s entire oeuvre. In the final part of the chapter, I turn to the Convivio and show how his more restrictive and dialectical handling of love in this treatise sees him resort to the kind of dualism that fettered these vernacular predecessors—one that runs counter to the emphasis on integration that defines the earlier Vita nova and the later Commedia. A consideration of the Convivio is pertinent at this juncture, since it is in Venus that Dante, through Charles Martel, cites his own canzone ‘Voi ch’intendendo’: a poem emblematic of his ‘conversion’ from Beatrice to Lady Philosophy. I also consider this dialectical handling of love in light of the classical pairing Dido/Aeneas, as evoked both in the Convivio and in the Heaven of Venus. The chapter’s study of Dante’s engagement with Folco highlights Dante’s determination to integrate lyric desire and religious content and challenges the view that we should regard the former troubadour as anticipating Dante’s own conversionary path. Like all Dante criticism, this book does not sail unchartered waters, but rather builds upon the work of a great number of scholars. In developing and formulating my own perspective in Part I, I reflect upon some fundamental aspects of Dante’s work and in doing so highlight my indebtedness to those who have gone before me. Part II, in focusing on Dante’s handling of his vernacular precursors, is in continual dialogue with a number of important studies in this area by Michelangelo Picone and, especially, Teodolinda Barolini, whose monograph Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ remains an indispensable point of reference in any consideration of Dante’s treatment of his literary predecessors.12 The principal differences between this book and Barolini’s 12 In addition to Dante’s Poets, a number of important essays can also be found in Barolini’s Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). By Picone, see ‘Vita nuova’ e tradizione romanza; ‘Giraut de Bornelh nella prospettiva di Dante’, Vox Romanica, 39 (1980), 22–43; ‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante’, L’Alighieri, 18 (2001), 5–19; ‘Paradiso IX: Dante, Folchetto e la diaspora trobadorica’, Medioevo romanzo, VIII (1981–1983), 47–89.

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far-reaching study are, first, that my analysis of Dante’s precursors is always specifically concerned with the complex relationship between eros and spirituality in Dante’s work, proceeding from my reading of his poetics of integration in Part I; and, second, that I focus in depth upon just three poets whose importance is especially pronounced in relation to this particular question. In short, the book aims to provide a fresh and substantial contribution to a number of important and still unresolved critical debates surrounding Dante’s poetics and handling of love, and to offer related insights into his complex relationship to his vernacular lyric heritage.13 In a period when a number of Anglophone scholars are attempting to situate Dante more precisely in relation to his theological milieu,14 the book also aims to reassert, in a complementary spirit, the importance of secular literary culture in shaping his poetry and authorial identity. Finally, while its central focus is clearly (and unapologetically) Dante, my hope is that the book offers not a narrow and enclosed study of this one poet but engages, through Dante’s work, with a number of debates and tensions that are of wider importance and resonance in our understanding of late-medieval culture.

13 For an example of the contentious status of eros in the Commedia, see the opposing views put forward by Lino Pertile (‘Does the stilnovo go to heaven?’) and Regina Psaki (‘Love for Beatrice’) in the volume Dante for the New Millennium, ed. by T. Barolini and H. W. Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 104–14 and 115–30. 14 See for example the important recent volumes: Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, ed. by V. Montemaggi and M. Treherne (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. by C. E. Honess and M. Treherne, 2 vols (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). Research is being carried out by a number of scholars at the Universities of Leeds and Warwick as part of the AHRC-funded project Dante’s Florence: Theology in Poetry, Practice and Society.

PART I D A N T E’S P O E T I C S O F INTEGRATION

1 Love, Authority, and Vernacular Poetry Dante’s poetic commitment to love is unwavering. Over a period of some thirty years, and across a number of works, he describes the effects— edifying and destructive, spiritual and sensual—that his desire for various women, historical and allegorical, has upon him. Most striking in this regard is the Commedia. Familiarity with the work can make us take for granted the extraordinary and challenging decision the poet takes in placing a secular donna, Beatrice, at the heart of his ‘poema sacro’ [sacred poem] (Par. XXV, 1). For all his undoubted concern as to the ethical validity and utility of his writings, and his attempts to appropriate for his work an authority no less than scriptural, one can argue that Dante never straightforwardly dissociates himself from the secular lyric tradition in which he began his career as a writer. This is in spite of that tradition’s contentious standing both in his own moral vision and in medieval Christian culture more broadly. But what informs such a complex and audacious allegiance to love? This chapter considers, in its three sections, how Dante’s erotic commitment is informed by questions of love, authority, and language. It has three overarching aims: first, to situate the topic in its wider cultural context; second, to explore Dante’s various attempts to valorize, authorize, and redeem love poetry in his ‘minor’ works; and third, to consider some of the tensions that emerge from these endeavours.

1.1 EROS AND SPIRITUALITY Dante’s extensive ruminations on the role and nature of love and desire are indebted to a wide range of poets, philosophers, and theologians, for these were questions that had occupied a central place in Western culture at least since classical times.1 While Aristotle had primarily conceived of desire as 1 Like other medieval and classical writers, Dante uses a broad and fluid vocabulary in describing love and desire. On the vocabulary of desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, see L. Pertile, ‘Introduzione: Semantica del desiderio’, in La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella ‘Commedia’ (Florence: Cadmo, 2005), pp. 19–39. On love and desire in

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a life force, able to be reconciled with reason, and Plato had argued that eros could take a spiritual as well as a more debased, sexual form, later classical writers, such as Virgil, Seneca, and Lucretius, regarded desire as more intrinsically perilous—a potential obstacle to the soul’s pursuit of higher civic and intellectual goals.2 Particularly treacherous was erotic desire, seen as the hardest form of desire to master, even a psychological disease, by ancient thinkers from Plato onwards. Such desire, chaotic and disruptive, would lead the lover to a state of inconsolable anguish and sometimes even to death—a fatalistic philosophy that underpins the Roman love elegy, features widely in classical epic poetry, and foreshadows aspects of the medieval Romance lyric. Love for many classical, and especially Roman, thinkers was not a force to be reoriented or refined but rather mastered through temperance in the pursuit of wisdom and happiness. Roman culture had largely viewed desire as dangerous and, lacking a redemptive object, inherently hopeless, as encapsulated by the tragic condition of the virtuous pagans in Dante’s Limbo (‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’ [without hope we live in longing]: Inf. IV, 42; ‘disïar . . . sanza frutto’ [fruitless desire]: Purg. III, 40); yet Christian thinkers transformed it into an instrument of salvation. The Hebrew Bible’s conception of desire as a symptom of the loss of Edenic plenitude was radically reformulated in light of the coming and resurrection of Christ. As discussed by Elena Lombardi, desire in the Christian world was no longer to indicate permanent ‘loss’, but temporary ‘lack’, since Christ had reopened the door to heavenly fulfilment. The fearing of God associated with the Old Testament was transformed into a longing for Him, with Christ assuming the epithet desideratus in the Latin Vulgate and some patristic writings.3 Dante, in addition to Pertile’s important volume, see especially Barolini, Dante and the Origins, pp. 21–121; F. Ferrucci, Il poema del desiderio (Milan: Leonardo, 1990), esp. pp. 221–64; Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, ed. by M. Gragnolati, T. Kay, E. Lombardi, and F. Southerden (Oxford: Legenda, 2012); M. Gragnolati, Amor che Move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini, Morante (Rome: Il Saggiatore, 2013); E. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 121–74, and now The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 2012). 2 For a survey of classical attitudes towards desire with reference to Dante, see Ferrucci, Il poema del desiderio, pp. 221–30. 3 ‘The full stop of history, Christ, the Desideratus, is the event that closes the sentence of desire-as-loss, which was opened by the Fall, and initiates the sentence of desire-as-longing’ (Syntax, p. 12). As noted by Lombardi and Pertile, the classical etymological derivation of desiderium (‘de-sideribus’—‘from the stars’) denotes a condition of permanent loss, referring to the loss of the tangible signs of the body that comes with death; see Lombardi, Syntax, pp. 11–12; Pertile, ‘Semantica’, pp. 19–20.

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While already a pillar of Christ’s teachings, love (caritas) gained a more central and clearly delineated role following the resurrection, thanks, initially, to the writings of St Paul. By placing God as its ultimate object, Paul transformed love from something treacherous into the impulse that could lead to eternal redemption. Already established along with faith and hope as one of the three theological virtues, Paul elevated love to a preeminent position.4 It became less narrowly associated with acts of benevolence to encompass the desire that would allow the Christian soul to overcome its painful exile and estrangement from the heavenly patria through a kind of spiritual pilgrimage.5 Desire and pilgrimage were indeed fundamental and interlocking dimensions of the fallen human condition. The Christian on earth was seen as a wandering pilgrim in exile from his eternal homeland able to return only along the road of love. This notion of a pilgrimage of desire would emerge as a key metaphor for life in later medieval culture, underpinning a great deal of religious and secular literature, not least Dante’s own.6 Yet while desire is afforded a redemptive role by early Christian thinkers, it by no means receives an unqualified endorsement. For Paul, the responsibility of the Christian pilgrim is to orient his innate desire away from worldly things and towards God, to allow caritas to prevail over the excessive love of worldly things, or cupiditas. Paul’s reflections on 4 See I Corinthians 13.13: ‘nunc autem manet fides spes caritas tria, haec maior autem his est caritas’ [and now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love]. All Bible translations are taken from the New International Version (2011), accessed at . Latin Vulgate text also accessed at the Bible Gateway site. 5 Paul designates fallen humans as ‘peregrini et hospites . . . supra terram’ [foreigners and strangers on earth] (Hebrews 11:13). As Dante writes in the Vita nova, a pilgrim is ‘chiunque è fuori de la sua patria’ [whoever is outside their homeland] (XL, 6). On Paul and Dante, see for example G. Di Scipio, The Presence of Pauline Thought in the Works of Dante (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); G. Petrocchi, ‘San Paolo in Dante’, in La selva del protonotario: Nuovi studi danteschi (Naples: Morano, 1988), pp. 65–82. 6 See for example F. C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: A Study of Theme and Genre in Medieval Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1971); G. B. Ladner, ‘Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order’, Speculum, 42 (1967), 233–59. Pilgrimage, says Picone, is ‘il campo metaforico di maggior rilievo nella semiosi letteraria medievale’ [the most prominent metaphorical field in medieval literary culture]: M. Picone, ‘Peregrinus Amoris: La metafora finale’, in ‘Vita nuova’ e tradizione romanza, pp. 129–72 (p. 129). On pilgrimage in Dante, see also Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 99–121; B. Basile, ‘Il viaggio come archetipo: note sul tema della “Peregrinatio” in Dante’, Letture Classensi, 15 (1986), 9–26; Lombardi, Wings, pp. 96–100; Picone, ‘Peregrinus Amoris’. On aspects of Dante and spiritual exile, see for example L. Hooper, ‘Exile and Rhetorical Order in the Vita nova’, L’Alighieri, 38 (2011), 5–27; A. Iannucci, ‘Fortuna, tempo e l’esilio di Dante’, in Forma ed evento nella Divina Commedia (Roma: Bulzoni, 1984), pp. 117–43; G. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 174–96; M. Picone, ‘Dante, Ovid and the Poetry of Exile’, in Dante in Oxford: The Paget Toynbee Lectures, ed. by T. Kay, M. McLaughlin, and M. Zaccarello (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 24–38.

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desire and pilgrimage were developed by the patristics. For Augustine, as for Paul, love for secondary goods was symptomatic of a deficient love for God, and the only legitimate form of desire was that for the heavenly patria.7 Augustine argues that Christians must treat the world around them as a means and not as an end, regarding contingent objects not as items to be valued in their own right but as signs to their Creator. Augustine’s opposition between uti and frui—between learning from earthly things and merely enjoying them—becomes the essence of the soul’s worldly pilgrimage and that which determines its eternal fate.8 Desire in the early Christian world was thus redeemed, but only insofar as its ultimate object was divine and eternal. Worldly desire retained the negative valence ascribed to it by Hebrew and classical thinkers. This was especially true in the case of erotic love, which was widely figured in opposition to divine love and scarcely differentiated from lust. Augustine’s Confessions famously relates how he was liberated from his devotion to worldly pleasures—above all, love of flesh, or concupiscentia carnis—so as to burn with divine caritas, placing earthly and divine loves in an unequivocal dichotomy.9 This kind of opposition remained normative 7 On Augustine and desire, see for example: I. Bochet, Saint Augustin et le désir de Dieu (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1982); Lombardi, Syntax, pp. 22–76; W. O’Connor, ‘The Uti/Frui Distinction in Augustine’s Ethics’, Augustinian Studies, 14 (1983), 45–62. On Augustine and Dante, see for example P. Hawkins, ‘ “Divide and Conquer”: Augustine in the Divine Comedy’, PMLA, 406 (1991), 471–82; E. Lombardi, ‘Dante and Augustine’, in Honess and Treherne, eds, Reviewing Dante’s Theology, I, 175–208; S. Marchesi, Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 8 See especially De doctrina Christiana I, iv, 4; I, xxii, 20. In the words of Lino Pertile, humans ‘devono servirsi di questo mondo come di un mezzo di trasporto, e non goderlo come fosse il fine ultimo (utendum ex hoc mundo, non fruendum)’ [must use this world as a means of transport, not enjoy it as a final destination] (‘Semantica’, pp. 19–38). See also Lombardi: ‘In Augustine, then, human life becomes a journey of desire that must be fixed and directed towards the homeland / God, and which can never be ensnared into the traps of earthly desire, can never enjoy what must be used’ (Wings, p. 98). 9 ‘Minus enim te amat qui tecum aliquid amat quod non propter te amat. O amor, qui semper ardes et numquam extingueris, caritas, deus meus, accende me! Continentiam iubes: da quod iubes et iube quod vis. Iubes certe ut contineam a concupiscentia carnis et concupiscentia oculorum et ambitione saeculi’ [For a man loves You so much the less if, besides You, he also loves something else which he does not love for Your sake. O Love ever burning, never quenched! O Charity, my God, set me on fire with your love! You command me to be continent. Give me the grace to do as You command, and command me to do what You will! It is truly Your command that I should be continent and restrain myself from gratification of corrupt nature, gratification of the eye, the empty pomp of living] (Confessions, 10.29–30). Latin cited from Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by W. Watts, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Translation taken from Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961). This same opposition is set out in the City of God, where Augustine describes how the numerous terms used in Scripture to denote ‘love’ can all appear in a positive or a negative sense: love for God is ‘correct’ love, ‘bonus amor’, while love of the flesh is defective love, ‘malus amor’, lust. See

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over the following centuries, encapsulated in the prevalent oppositions between Eve and Mary we find in medieval Christian culture.10 Earthly love, while necessary for the perpetuation of the human species, was tainted, associated with the egotism of the Fall and subsequent dissemination of original sin.11 Scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas regarded marriage as inferior to celibacy and sex as potentially lustful even in wedlock.12 Aquinas indeed attaches no value or dignity to earthly love, arguing that sex invariably involves some degree of shame since it stems from passion and the abandonment of reason.13 Secular love literature, too, was strongly condemned by prominent theologians.14 Despite this apparent rigidity, however, some medieval Christian thinkers approached the relationship between earthly and divine love in a more complex fashion, drawing upon the language of worldly desire in expressing their desire for God. The seventh-century Pope Gregory the Great, known as the ‘doctor of desire’, was a mediating presence between Augustine and the more radical syncretism of sensual language and divine love we find in the later Middle Ages.15 Gregory developed the concept of desiderium supernum: an innate longing for God that defines all human experience. He employed language of unprecedented dynamism and physicality in describing this desire, blurring the conventional opposition between worldly and spiritual forms of love at a semantic level. This tendency intensified in the later Middle Ages. St Bernard of Clairvaux in City of God, 14.7. Cited from Saint Augustine, City of God, trans. by W. M. Green, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–1972). 10 On Mary and Eve as ‘opposite sexual poles’ in medieval culture, see for example V. Tumanov, ‘Mary Versus Eve: Paternal Uncertainty and the Christian View of Women’, Neophilologus, 95 (2011), 507–21. 11 ‘Christians read the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve as implying a flaw in human sexuality, not necessarily a cause of sin but as a prime expression of selfish egotism’: H. Chadwick, ‘The Early Christian Community’, in The Oxford History of Christianity, ed. by J. McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 [reprint 2002]), pp. 21–69 (p. 44). ‘One way of obverting the problem was to say, with Augustine, that human nature before the Fall was other than it had become, that there had been a right order in the Garden of Eden when the human will commanded sexual desire’: P. Williams, Through Human Love to God: Essays on Dante and Petrarch (Troubador: Leicester, 2007), p. 39. 12 As Pertile writes: ‘Solo dove non c’è piacere il coito non è adultero’ [Only in the absence of pleasure can coitus avoid being adulterous]: ‘Mal d’amore’, in La punta del disio, pp. 39–58 (p. 40). As noted by Lombardi, marriage in medieval culture, largely arranged, was ‘aimed at the absence of desire’ (Wings, p. 60). On medieval lust, as a ‘complex, fragmented, diverging discourse’ (p. 51), see Lombardi, Wings, pp. 51–85. 13 For Aquinas’s sexual ethics, see especially Summa theologiae (ST), 2a 2ae qq. 151–4. 14 Lombardi notes the fact that early commentators on canto V of Dante’s Inferno recall the prohibitions against erotic literature on the part of Isidore of Seville and Jerome (Wings, p. 228). 15 On Gregory and Dante, see V. Montemaggi’s essay in Honess and Treherne, eds, Reviewing Dante’s Theology, I, 209–62.

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the twelfth century, for instance, was among the mystical theologians who described their desire for God in language of striking ardour, with his Mariological writings unmistakably erotic in tone.16 Bernard revelled in his desire for God, and even saw worldly desire as a foretaste of the perfected desire of beatitude, where it enters into a dynamic process of simultaneous generation and satisfaction.17 It is indicative of the erotic flavour of medieval mystical writings that they would enjoy a fluid relationship with secular traditions of love poetry.18 The negative associations of the flesh were complicated in other theological contexts, too. Caroline Walker Bynum, in particular, has emphasized the growing emphasis on the resurrected body in medieval Christianity, which led to a more accepting attitude towards corporeality and a greater emphasis upon an affective and embodied experience of Christian worship and contemplation.19 The sort of sensual language used by these figures is closely related to the biblical Song of Songs, a hugely influential work during the Middle Ages in its mediation between earthly and divine love.20 The ostensibly 16 Pertile describes Bernard’s desire as ‘ardore, avidità, impazienza’ [ardour, avidity, impatience]: ‘Semantica’, p. 30. On Bernard and the Virgin Mary, see S. Botterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 49–63. 17 See Pertile, ‘Semantica’, p. 29. Dante’s indebtedness to Bernard’s mysticism, and his dynamic language of desire, is underlined by the key role of the saint in the final cantos of the Paradiso. On the relationship between Dante and Bernard, see Botterill’s fundamental study. Pertile also shows the influence of mystical articulations of desire upon Dante’s Paradiso: see ‘Desiderio di Paradiso’, in La punta del disio, pp. 137–61. 18 See E. Gilson, La théologie mystique de Saint Bernard (Paris: Vrin, 1934), pp. 193–215; A. Roncaglia, ‘Riflessi di posizioni cistercensi nella poesia del XII secolo’, in I cistercensi e il Lazio: Atti delle giornate di studio dell’Istituto di Studi dell’Arte dell’Università di Roma, 17–21 Maggio 1977 (Rome: Multigrafica, 1978), pp. 11–22. A. Suerbaum, ‘Between “Unio” and Alienation: Expressions of Desire in the Strophic Poems of Hadewijch’, in Gragnolati et al., eds, Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, pp. 152–63; J. Wettstein, ‘Mezura’, l’idèal des troubadours, son essence et ses aspects (Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). 19 See C. Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality in the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). This shift ‘brought to the theology of the early Middle Ages, with its generally distant and omnipotent God, a new insistence on the carnal immediacy of Mary and Jesus’: J. T. Schnapp, ‘Dante’s Sexual Solecisms: Gender and Genre in the Commedia’, in The New Medievalism, ed. by M. S. Brownlee, K. Brownlee, and S. G. Nichols (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 201–25 (p. 204). 20 On the Song of Songs in the Middle Ages, see for example: A. W. Askell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Michael Casey, A Thirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2005); E. A. Matter, ‘The Voice of My Beloved’: The Song of Songs in Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); D. Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the ‘Song of Songs’ (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995). On the Salomonic tradition and Dante, see P. Nasti, Favole

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profane story of the courtship and consummation of lovers, attributed to Solomon, was subjected to an extraordinary amount of commentary and allegorical interpretation in the Middle Ages, predominantly understood as an allegory of the marriage between Christ and the Church or between God and the individual Christian soul. On the one hand, this allegorical attention shows that commentators felt its literal and carnal sense needed to be exorcized. But its ubiquity is also testament to a realization that the language of human love offered a dynamic and suggestive vocabulary through which profound spiritual truths could be articulated.21 The influence of the Song of Songs was not restricted to the realm of theology. Its imagery made a considerable impression on the medieval love lyric, and its use and validation of erotic allegory underpinned much of the interplay between secular and religious cultures we find in this period.22 Not only did love poets draw upon imagery from the Song of Songs and the mystics in their lyrics, but, following the decline of troubadour poetry in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century, the tropes of love poetry were transferred to a tradition of religious poetry in the vernacular.23 It was the Song of Songs, more than any other single factor, that acted as a nexus between the sacred and the secular, prompting writers from both spheres to exploit linguistically the suggestive parallels between erotic and spiritual modes of desire. d’amore e ‘saver profondo’: La tradizione salomonica in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2007); L. Pertile La puttana e il gigante: Dal ‘Cantico dei cantici’ al ‘Paradiso terrestre’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1998); A. Rossini, Il Dante Sapienziale: Dionigi e la bellezza di Beatrice (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2009). 21 ‘Il linguaggio erotico del Cantico fu avvertito come la vera voce del desiderio ascetico dell’anima di ricongiungersi a Dio attraverso il rifiuto della carne, al punto che uno stesso termine, amor, fu usato per designare due fenomenologie affettive apparentemente inconciliabili: la passione sensuale e la caritas cristiana’ [The erotic language of the Song of Songs was seen as an expression of the soul’s chaste desire to be reconciled with God through the refusal of the flesh, so that a single term, Amor, was used to designate two apparently irreconcilable forms of love: sexual appetite and Christian charity]: Nasti, pp. 25–6. 22 On the Song of Songs and secular love poetry, see for example d’A. S. Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni: Saggio sulla lirica italiana del XIII secolo (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1977); P. Dronke, ‘The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric’, in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. by W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1976), pp. 256–62; L. Lazzerini, ‘La trasmutazione insensibile: Intertestualità e metamorfismi nella lirica trobadorica dalle origini alla codificazione cortese’, Medioevo Romanzo, 18 (1993), 153–205 and 313–369; Nasti, pp. 49–53; A. Pulega, Amore cortese e modelli teologici: Guglielmo IX, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante (Milan: Jaca Book, 1995). On the interplay between medieval lyric poetry and religious texts in terms of their shared lexicon of ‘passion’ as a mode of love-suffering, see E. Auerbach, ‘Passio as Passion’, in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Eric Auerbach, ed. by J. I. Porter and trans. by J. O. Newman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 165–87. 23 See for example M. Lazar, ‘Fin’amor’, in A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. by F. R. P. Akehurst and J. M. Davis (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1995), pp. 61–100 (pp. 90–7).

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One must, of course, be careful not to mistake these developments in medieval religious culture for a wider theological endorsement of earthly love. Bernard used the language of erotic love to describe the ineffable ecstasy of divine union, since he believed that fallen humans possessed a limited capacity to comprehend the divine. The same can be said for the medieval fascination with the Song of Songs: Gregory argued that the text’s erotic language was a form of merciful condescension on the part of God, infusing his people with spiritual desire in the ‘fallen’ terms which they would understand.24 This symbiosis of sacred and profane vocabularies did not amount to a substantive dissolution of the longstanding opposition between eros and spirituality within medieval Christian thought. What is clear, however, is that these shifts, in which the language of love emerged as a privileged means of expressing spiritual truths and longings, and in which the body was emphasized as a locus of spiritual as well as erotic desire, offered the stimulus for the relationship between earthly and divine love to be approached in less rigid terms. The repercussions of this would be felt especially strongly in the production of secular love poets, and arguably in the work of Dante more than any other. Secular medieval literature from the later Middle Ages presents us with a similar picture with regard to the relationship between earthly and divine forms of love. Once again, we are confronted with an intriguing semantic fluidity as well as evidence of an enduring substantive opposition. While love is interrogated in a wide range of secular discourses, arguably its most important treatment, and certainly the most pertinent in the context of the present book, comes in the Romance lyric tradition that first flourished in the feudal courts of Occitania around the turn of the twelfth century, before developing in the Italian peninsula over the course of the thirteenth. The poetry of the Occitan troubadours, which was predominantly sung, evolved in a relatively secularized milieu and its content, while encompassing moral and political themes, was largely amatory.25 24 See Pertile: ‘queste parole non devono gettare nel ridicolo il testo sacro, ma farci apprezzare la misericordia di Dio che per infiammare il nostro cuore a perseguire l’amor sacro non esita a utilizzare il linguaggio del nostro turpe amore’ [these words should not undermine the sacred text, but rather make us appreciate the mercy of God, who, in order to inflame our hearts with divine love, does not hesitate to draw upon the language of our own profane form of love]: ‘Semantica’, p. 31. 25 For a detailed study of the culture that fostered troubadour poetry, see L. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100–c.1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also R. Harvey, ‘Courtly Culture in Medieval Occitania’, in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. by S. Gaunt and S. Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 8–27. On the relationship between troubadour poetry and music, see for example M. Switten, ‘Music and versification: Fetz Macabrus los motz e·l so’, in Gaunt and Kay, eds, The Troubadours, pp. 141–63; H. van der Werf, ‘Music’, in Akehurst and Davis, eds, A Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 121–63.

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Indeed, there was a powerful association between troubadour song and the experience of love. For early troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn: Chantars no pot gaire valer, Si d’ins dal cor no mou lo chans! Ni chans no pot dal cor mover, Si no i es fin’ amors coraus.26 [Singing cannot be of any worth, unless the song comes from the heart; and the song cannot come from the heart, if it does not contain true love.]

Love among the troubadours emerges not merely as a prescribed topic, but as a source of vernacular authority, a supposed guarantor of authenticity and spontaneity. Their poetry—and that of their Italian successors— eschews the possibility of either possession or rejection of the beloved and instead fetishizes the painful condition of lack and suspension.27 The troubadour lyric displays an elaborate stylistic sophistication and a highly complex relationship to pre-existing literary traditions, from medieval Christian and Islamic sources to classical and medieval Latin literature.28 Often cited too is the feudal contract between serf and master, metamorphosed into the amatory relation between lover and domna (lady, derived from the Latin domina).29 These entangled cultural roots have prompted diverging theories as to the nature and spiritual implications of the love described by the troubadours. Critics have often emphasized the edifying properties of love in the troubadour corpus: a love purged of the erotic, refining the lover’s moral conduct and sensibility, and fortifying his temperance or mezura.30 The influential label ‘courtly love’, coined by 26

Cited from Bernart de Ventadourn, Chansons d’Amour, ed. by M. Lazar (Paris, Klincksieck, 1966), p. 64. Translation my own. 27 As Pertile writes, ‘Il trovatore sceglierà sempre di vivere nel desiderio anziché possedere l’amata o rinunciare a essa ed essere libero; alla realtà dell’esperienza preferirà sempre il fantasma della propria immaginazione. . . . La reciprocità dell’amore non è affatto necessaria e può anzi essere un fattore negativo per il trovatore il cui amore è profondo e genuino nella misura in cui è frustrato’ [The troubadour will always choose to live in desire rather than possessing the beloved or forgetting her and becoming free; he will always favour the phantasm of his own imagination over the reality. The reciprocation of his love is not necessary and can, indeed, be a negative factor for the troubadour, whose love is proven to be profound and genuine by the extent to which it is thwarted]: Pertile, ‘Semantica’, p. 34. 28 For a helpful overview of the tradition’s cultural roots, see G. A. Bond, ‘Origins’, in Akehurst and Davis, eds, A Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 237–54. 29 On metaphors of vassalage in troubadour poetry, see Paterson, World of the Troubadours, pp. 28–36. Eliza Miruna Ghil offers a survey of different metaphorical fields (feudal, legal, professional, religious) exploited by the troubadours in their love poetry: ‘Imagery and Vocabulary’, in Akehurst and Davis, eds, A Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 441–66. 30 See for example A. J. Denomy, ‘Courtly Love and Courtliness’, Speculum, 28 (1953), 44–63: ‘Courtly Love is a type of sensual love and what distinguishes it from other forms of sexual love, from mere passion, from so-called Platonic love, from married love is its

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Gaston Paris in the nineteenth century, has often been associated with this understanding of love in troubadour poetry as an ennobling force.31 Other critics have highlighted the spiritual resonance of some troubadour poetry, identifying echoes of Christian texts, most notably the Song of Songs. D’Arco Silvio Avalle, for example, has shown the lyric topos of the locus amoenus, found in both Occitan and Italian traditions, to be closely linked to the Song’s hortus conclusus,32 while Laura Lazzerini has shown pervasive echoes of the Song in the lyrics of the early troubadour Jaufré Rudel, whose poetry is noted for its theme of amor de lonh—a desire for a distant and unattainable countess. Lazzerini argues that Rudel’s poems allegorize the pain born out of the subject’s longing for the divine. Reading the lyric in this mystical key places the lady as a figure of God and the poet-lover in the position of the contemplative Christian soul.33 Yet while poets engaged with Christian texts, the notion that love in the troubadour corpus ought to be understood widely in an allegorical sense has been contested by other scholars, who argue that the term ‘courtly love’ has prompted an unduly monolithic interpretation of what is in fact a highly complex and unstable phenomenon.34 While some poets highlight

purpose or motive, its formal object, namely, the lover’s progress and growth in natural goodness, merit and worth’ (p. 44; emphasis mine). Linda Paterson defines Mezura as ‘selfdiscipline, the ability to moderate one’s passions with rational control, to avoid extremes or anything that contravenes courtly behaviour’, while noting that the term was a contentious one among the troubadours themselves: ‘Fin’amor and the development of the courtly canso’, in Gaunt and Kay, eds, The Troubadours, pp. 28–46. 31 G. Paris, ‘Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac’, Romania, 12 (1883), 459–534. 32 See Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni. On the locus amoenus topos, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 195–202. 33 On the interplay between troubadour poetry and Christian literature, in addition to Lazzerini, see P. Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the Medieval Love-Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); J. Leclerq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 34 Lazar refers to ‘the misuse of the term amour courtois in a restrictive and shallow definition that fails to encompass a variety of modes of love that, in spite of having in common the basic elements of courtliness and a set of canonized poetic formulas, cannot be reduced to a single common denominator’ (‘Fin’amor’, p. 71). On the diverse approaches to love found in a selection of troubadours, see L. T. Topsfield, Troubadours and Love (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For reappraisals of love in the troubadour corpus, see M. Lazar, ‘Fin’amor’, and Amour courtois et fin’amors dans la littérature du XIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1964); Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts, ed. by M. Lazar and N. J. Lacy (Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1989), particularly the essays F. R. P. Akehurst, ‘Words and Acts in the Troubadours’, and M. Lazar, ‘Carmina Erotica, Carmina Iocosa: The Body and the Bawdy in Medieval Love Songs’, pp. 17–28 and 249–76. Akehurst argues that ‘there is perhaps a connotation of

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the restraint which could render their desire virtuous and others draw on religious sources, these are not constants in the tradition. Many poets dwell upon the immoderate, disruptive nature of their passion. Moshe Lazar emphasizes the secular context in which the troubadour lyric flourished, arguing that ‘all . . . attempts [to allegorize courtly poetry] constitute a wishful denial of the adulterous tenor of fin’amor and an exercise in literary exorcism’.35 Citing twelfth-century sermons, he underlines the clerical opposition to the values of ‘courtly’ society, which emerge as ‘diametrically opposed to the Clunine ideals that had dominated thought and behaviour for over a century, articulated in the context of [eleventh-century] epic poetry’.36 This tension between Christianity and the values of courtly poetry can also be witnessed in a twelfth-century text such as Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, which shows numerous links to the troubadours’ poetry.37 The treatise, modelled upon Ovid’s Ars amatoria, codifies the norms to which the ‘courtly’ lover should adhere. Capellanus makes it explicit that fin’amor is a suffering (passio) first triggered by immoderate erotic fixation, that it should take place outside wedlock, but that it remains an ‘ennobling’ pursuit.38 The structure of the treatise is also telling, as the author uses its third and final book to recant the sacrilegious (and archetypally ‘courtly’) content of the earlier two. While it has been debated to what extent the De amore should be regarded as a parodic work,39 the fact

sexual intercourse in every occurrence of the word joi, which is the fourth commonest noun in the troubadour poems’ (p. 26). 35 Lazar, ‘Fin’amor’, pp. 72–3. 36 Lazar, ‘Fin’amor’, p. 63. Étienne Gilson, too, while accepting that the troubadours drew upon mystical sources, firmly rejects the notion that fin’amor and Christian mysticism should be equated. See La théologie mystique, pp. 170–97. 37 On the links between the De amore and the troubadour lyric, see, for example, E. Malato, ‘Amor cortese e amor cristiano da Andrea Cappellano a Dante’, in Lo fedele consiglio de la ragione: Studi e ricerche di letteratura italiana (Rome: Salerno, 1989), pp. 126–227 (pp. 136–44). 38 The treatise begins: ‘Amor est passio quedam innata ex visione procedens et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus’ [Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex] (I, i, 1). Among the ‘rules’ of love found at the end of Book II are ‘Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio recta’ [Marriage is no real excuse for not loving] and ‘Qui non zelat amare non potest’ [He who is not jealous cannot love] (II, viii, 44). On the benefits of love, Capellanus exclaims: ‘O, quam mira res est amor, qui tantis facit hominem fulgere virtutibus, tantisque docet quemlibet bonis moribus abundare!’ [O what a wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character!] (I, iv, 1). Latin text accessed at . English translation taken from Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, ed. and trans. J. J. Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 39 See, for example, D. W. Robertson Jr., ‘The Subject of the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus’, Modern Philology, 50 (1953), 145–61.

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that the book was later banned in the Condemnation of 1277 suggests that the text’s later readers, at very least, took its content seriously, and perceived a clear opposition between the love described in the treatise and that enshrined in the teachings of the Church.40 Perhaps the most conclusive evidence that the dominant form of troubadour love was at odds with those teachings is found in the biographies of the troubadours themselves, a good many of whom—including Folco, and perhaps Arnaut—ultimately recanted their commitment to love poetry and retired to monasteries.41 If some troubadour lyrics may have been intended allegorically, then, surely a larger number were more straightforwardly secular and erotic in the love they described, and this eroticism was often identified as contravening the poet’s Christian obligations. In the words of Aldo Scaglione, ‘Provençal troubadours had sung a form of love that, for all its individual variations . . . was a profoundly secular form of self-gratification that flouted the received standards of Christian morality and the Church’s social and institutional demands of personal loyalty and fidelity within marriage.’42 Since I am concerned in the second part of this book with how Dante engages with the philosophies of other medieval love poets, the question of whether he himself identified a redemptive spiritual quality in the troubadour lyric is a vital one. The evidence in the Commedia, however, strongly suggests that he did not. Francesca’s speech in Inferno V is saturated with courtly allusions; Arnaut, Dante’s paradigmatic Occitan love poet, is classified among those guilty of ‘seguendo come bestie l’appetito’ [running behind their appetites like beasts] (Purg. XXVI, 84); while Folco of Marseilles, latterly Bishop of Toulouse, defines his past commitment to love poetry as his ‘colpa’ [fault] (Par. IX, 104), and resides among the formerly lascivious, comparing himself to archetypal exemplars of lust from the classical world. Thus, the complex exchange between troubadour poetry and religious traditions does not affect a conviction that underpins this study: that the dominant ideology of the pre-existing Romance lyric, as Dante understands it, was defined by tension, by competing desires and obligations. While troubadour poetry waned in France,43 it survived in the courts of northern Italy, particularly the Veneto, where it enjoyed considerable 40

See P. Delhaye, ‘The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277’, Medieval Studies, 8 (1946), 107–49. 41 Folco’s conversion is well documented. For Arnaut’s possible ‘retirement’ to a monastery, we rely on Benvenuto’s commentary on the Commedia; see DDP: Benvenuto da Imola, commentary on Purgatorio XXVI, 115–18. 42 A. Scaglione, ‘Courtly Love’, in DE, pp. 235–8 (p. 236). 43 Some critics, such as Lazar, have linked the decline of troubadour poetry to the twelfth-century Albigensian crusade. Lazar demonstrates that following the crusade the

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popularity.44 The troubadours were widely read, and some Italians adopted the Occitan language in producing lyric poetry of their own.45 Though the Veneto was the chief receptor of troubadour poetry, it was in Frederick II’s magna curia in Sicily that the Italian love lyric first developed. The Sicilians’ poetry is deeply indebted to that of the troubadours, transferring the linguistic and thematic apparatus that governed the earlier tradition.46 It is nevertheless Sicilian poetry that introduced a more searching, meditative approach to lyric themes.47 This development is manifested, above all, in the invention of the sonnet, whose compact and divided structure, in the words of Teodolinda Barolini, ‘epitomizes a moment, a thought, or a problematic by approaching it from two dialectical perspectives’.48 The form contributed to the divorce of poetry and music and encouraged poets to interrogate the tensions implicit in the tradition they had inherited.49 Poets furthermore benefited from modalities of troubadour poetry are deployed in devotional texts, its profane significance altogether extracted: ‘In what might be qualified a “mariological century”, following the demise of the sensual and erotic fin’amor tradition, the “heavenly lady”, “Our Lady”, gradually displaced in society and in literature the “earthly lady”, “my lady”; and so, in an ultimate refinement, the donna became the Madonna’: Lazar, ‘Fin’amor’, p. 97. Other critics downplay the influence of the crusade, and note the ongoing poetic activity and diversification of creative talent rather than the quashing of secular poetry by the forces of orthodoxy. See for example Harvey, pp. 9–10; W. D. Paden, ‘The Troubadours and the Albigensian Crusade: A Long View’, Romance Philology, 49 (1995), 168–91; M. Routledge, ‘The Later Troubadours: noels digz de nova maestria’, in Gaunt and Kay, eds, The Troubadours, pp. 99–122. 44 On the dissemination of Occitan texts in Italy, see d’A. S. Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d’oc, 2nd edn, ed. by L. Leonardi (Turin: Einaudi, 1993). On the appearance of troubadours at the courts of northern Italy and their legacy, see G. Folena, ‘Tradizione e cultura trobadorica nelle corti e nelle città venete’, in Cultura e lingua nel Veneto medievale (Padua: Programma, 1990), pp. 1–137. On the transition from the Occitan to the Italian tradition, see L. Leonardi, ‘La poesia delle origini e del duecento’, in Storia della letteratura italiana: Volume X: La tradizione dei testi, ed. by E. Malato and C. Circiola (Rome: Salerno, 2001), pp. 5–89 (pp. 17–23). 45 See H.-E. Keller, ‘Italian Troubadours’, in Akehurst and Davis, eds, A Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 295–304. 46 On the transition from Occitan to early Italian poetry, see for example A. Fratta, Le fonti provenzali dei poeti della Scuola siciliana (Florence: Le lettere, 1996); E. Lombardi, ‘Traduzione e riscrittura: da Folchetto al Notaio’, The Italianist, 24 (2004), 5–19; G. Santini, Tradurre la rima. Sulle origini del lessico rimico nella lirica italiana del Duecento (Rome: Bagatto, 2007). 47 On the increasingly meditative and introspective character of early Italian poetry, see P. Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 1–40. 48 T. Barolini, ‘Dante and the Lyric Past’, in Dante and the Origins, pp. 23–45 (p. 25). On the development of the early Italian sonnet, see C. Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986). 49 On the role of the sonnet in separating poetry and music, see M. Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere: Ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere (Padua: Liviana, 1979).

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concurrent advances in other cultural and intellectual spheres, from philosophy to optics, which gave them the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus with which to dissect the workings of love, and its relation to God and to knowledge, with ever greater precision. Their diverging theories of love sought to discredit those of their rivals and surpass them in originality and philosophical rigour. It was in Tuscany, where lyric poetry also took on an increasingly sociopolitical function,50 that this poetic inquiry into the relationship between competing modes of desire flourished above all. While the feudal culture of twelfth-century Provence had borne some resemblance to thirteenthcentury Veneto and Frederick’s Sicily, it scarcely resembled the protocapitalist communes of Duecento Tuscany. Seen in a fresh context, the inherited notion of fin’amor began to appear specious and anachronistic, and presented the poet-lover with a fundamental question: could his love be transformed and redeemed, or must it be rejected? The extremely rapid evolution of Italian literary culture in the late Duecento and early Trecento owes much to the fervent intellectual debate that this question sparked. Each protagonist of the early Italian tradition defined his poetic ideology and identity in clear dialogue with his immediate precursors. Guittone d’Arezzo’s stark separation of the worldly and the spiritual, for instance, was constructed in opposition to the insoluble tension posited by the Sicilians and the troubadours,51 while Guido Guinizzelli’s ethereal ‘donna angelicata’ was to a considerable extent a reaction against the rigid moral boundaries imposed by the dominant Guittone.52 It is no coincidence that the three early Italian poets—Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti—with whom Dante engages most profoundly on an ideological level and in dialogue with whom he refines his own love poetry, are those whose writing probed with greatest originality the relationship between eros and spirituality.53 Guittone and Cavalcanti, in very different 50 On the socio-political aspects that exerted their pressure upon the composition and compilation of lyric texts in the Duecento, as poetic transcription became entangled with notarial practices, see especially J. Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 51 As discussed in Chapter 3, Leonardi notes numerous echoes of both Sicilian and Occitan poets in Guittone’s subversive, anti-courtly ‘canzoniere’ of erotic sonnets; see Guittone d’Arezzo, Canzoniere, ed. by Leonardi. 52 See for example M. Picone, ‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante’. 53 As noted in the introduction, there is a huge amount of bibliography on Dante and Cavalcanti, which is among the reasons why I choose not to focus on him in this book. In addition to the monographic studies cited there, see especially: Z. G. Barański, ‘ “Per similitudine di abito scientifico”: Dante, Cavalcanti and the Sources of Medieval “Philosophical” Poetry’, in Literature and Science in Italian Culture From Dante to the Present Day, ed. by P. Antonello and S. Gilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2004), pp. 14–52; T. Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno V in its Lyric

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ways, elaborate fatalistic theories of love, denying the power of reason to curb its insidious advances and, in Cavalcanti’s case, strongly associating it with death. Guinizzelli, like Dante, albeit somewhat more tentatively, attempts to ‘redeem’ the lyric, aligning his love for the lady with his love for God and presenting love as a path to knowledge and salvation. Later, Petrarch’s fresh separation of the competing poles of God and Laura, and the profound struggle of the will that this tension elicits, is in many ways a reaction against the radical and audacious metaphysical claims that Dante had made in relation to Beatrice.54 For all the evolution we observe within the early Italian lyric, it nevertheless displays continuity with troubadour poetry to the extent that Dante himself regards the two movements as part of a broader Romance tradition.55 At the heart of his moral critique of Guinizzelli in Purgatorio XXVI, where the Bolognese is purged of his concupiscence, lies the conviction that, for all his innovative spiritual rhetoric, his verse remains contaminated by the lust that had tainted that of the troubadours, that same ‘passada folor’ [past folly] (143) of Arnaut Daniel, who appears alongside him.56 In short, the tension at the heart of the troubadour lyric, while confronted with ever more candour and probed with ever more sophistication, had not, according to Dante, been resolved.

Context’, in Dante and the Origins, pp. 70–101, and Dante’s Poets, pp. 123–53; R. P. Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 69–90. On Dante and Guinizzelli, see for example Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 125–36; V. Moleta, Guinizzelli in Dante (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1980); M. Picone, ‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante’; R. Rea, ‘Guinizzelli praised and explained (da [O] caro padre meo al XXVI del Purgatorio)’, The Italianist, 30 (2010), 1–17; Steinberg, pp. 17–60. Extensive bibliography on Dante and Guittone is provided in Chapter 3. 54 See especially Z. G. Barański, ‘Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti’, and C. Moevs, ‘Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch’, both in Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. by Z. G. Barański and T. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 50–113 and 226–59. 55 See VN, XXV, 4–6 and compare also the poetic genealogies, from the troubadours to Dante, traced in Book II of the DVE. 56 Guinizzelli’s sin resides ‘in [quel libro] di ogni poeta cortese che elegga a proprio tema specifico l’amore laico, il vagheggiamento della donna, stornando alla creatura—nei termini del Secretum—la reverenza che conviene al creatore’ [in the work of every courtly poet who chooses as his subject earthly love, the yearning for the lady, directing towards the creature—in the terms of Petrarch’s Secretum—the reverence only merited by the Creator]: Giunta, La poesia italiana, p. 53. ‘L’amore di cui trattano i rimatori [italiani] è sicuramente una passione sensuale quale l’aveva definita il Cappellano, e tendente al possesso della cosa amata’ [The love which medieval Italian poets describe is without doubt a sensual passion, as theorized by Cappellanus, aimed at the possession of the beloved]: B. Nardi, ‘Filosofia d’amore nei rimatori del Duecento e in Dante’, in Dante e la cultura medievale (Naples: Laterza, 1949), pp. 1–92 (p. 21).

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In both secular and religious culture, therefore, we find signs of an unlikely rapprochement between eros and spirituality, and, in this process, the two spheres undoubtedly cross-fertilized one other. Yet, while the fracture between the two forms of love had shown signs of healing, it remained a fracture: mystical theologians oriented themselves towards God, not a lady, while poets oriented themselves towards a lady (albeit one who at times took on angelic qualities), and continued to feel anxious in doing so. The two distinct objects pointed to two inherently distinct, and ultimately competing, forms of desire. As a secular lyric poet, Dante thus belonged to a poetic tradition that could splice the language of earthly and divine love in suggestive ways, but that remained morally contentious, since it ultimately pertained to the negative pole of an entrenched flesh– spirit dialectic. This situation is perhaps best encapsulated by Guinizzelli’s famous canzone, ‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’ [Love returns always to a noble heart]. The poem links love to ‘gentilezza’, nobility, which Guido sees as rooted not in lineage but in virtue. ‘Al cor gentil’ not only seeks to fuse love poetry and ethical content, but also to defuse the tension between erotic and spiritual desire, through a crescendo of elaborate natural analogies. In the fifth stanza, the desire that links lover and donna is even likened to the desire that bonds the angelic intelligences to God. Yet Guinizzelli’s bold rhetoric is undercut by a hypothetical exchange between the poet and his Lord in the congedo: Donna, Deo mi dirà, ‘Che presomisti?’, sïando l’alma mia a lui davanti. ‘Lo ciel passati e ’nfin a Me venisti e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti: ch’a Me conven le laude e a la Reina del reame degno, per cui cessa onne fraude’. Dir li porò: ‘Tenne d’angel sembianza che fosse del Tuo regno; non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza’. (V, 51–60)57 [Lady, God will say to me when my soul stands before Him, ‘How could you presume? You went past heaven, coming finally to me, and tried to compare Me to a vain love. All praises are due to Me alone and to the Queen of this noble realm through whom all evil ends’. But I shall say to Him, ‘She had the likeness of an angel from your kingdom. It’s not my fault if I fell in love with her’.]

57 Cited from Guido Guinizzelli, Rime, ed. by L. Rossi (Einaudi: Turin, 2002). Translations of Guinizzelli’s work are taken from The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, ed. and trans. by R. Edwards (New York and London: Garland, 1987).

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God here reprimands the poet on account of his blasphemy, while the poet justifies his audacious rhetoric by arguing that his worldly lady had truly appeared divine.58 The poem, then, is bold in its alignment of human and divine objects, but accepts here the danger of its operation, love for the lady retaining its association with a defective form of desire (‘vano amor’) opposed to the sort merited by God. While pointing towards a radical integration of loves, the conflict at the heart of the love lyric (what Barolini terms the ‘troubadour impasse’) nevertheless resurfaces.59 For Dante, the beauty of ‘Al cor gentil’ was its very self-conscious ambivalence: its use of spiritual analogies allowed him to use it as a platform for negotiating in daring ways the relationship between earthly love and spirituality, while its confessional final stanza creates a space for Dante to transcend its moral limitations. It both suggestively subverts and resignedly underlines the love lyric’s enduring dualism. It should be stressed immediately that Dante’s approach to this thorny question is not singular but manifold, subject to a number of oscillations over the course of several decades. The Commedia, Dante’s definitive response to this tension, will be considered in the next chapter, but at this point I would like to consider how it is approached in two earlier works: the Vita nova and the Convivio. These texts offer different responses to this opposition in a manner that brings to our attention some of the difficulties Dante faced as a poet who sought a morally robust mode of vernacular writing while remaining loyal to love for a woman as his creative source. Guinizzelli’s canzone effectively serves as a blueprint for Dante’s Vita nova (compiled c.1295), the work in Dante’s oeuvre that confronts most directly, and exclusively, the tensions and associations considered above.60 The libello compiles a selection of Dante’s early lyrics and frames them in an expository prose narrative to present an ‘authorized’ account of his poetic and spiritual development. While not always borne out by the 58 As Barolini puts it, Guinizzelli ‘both acknowledges the dangers of his audacious yoking of the secular with the divine, and brilliantly defends his analogical procedure’: ‘Dante and the Lyric Past’, pp. 31–2. Contini describes the congedo as ‘un’ironica autocritica della temerità’ [an ironic criticism of the poet’s own temerity]: G. Contini, in Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960), II, 460. For Lombardi, the congedo shows that Guinizzelli’s approach can be pardoned if understood in terms of homology but not in terms of similarity or analogy: ‘The woman is not a mere analogy of God, one that can simply be framed in a simile. Her beauty captures something of the divine, and brings the figure of an angel to the lover’s perception, thus making his love for her ingenuous and innocent’ (Wings, p. 172). 59 Barolini, ‘Dante and the Lyric Past’, p. 32. 60 I use the title, Vita nova, proposed by Guglielmo Gorni: see ‘Paragrafi e titolo della Vita nova’, in Studi di filologia italiana, 52 (1995), 203–22.

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poems compiled in the Vita nova, Dante claims that his love was always guided by reason’s faithful counsel: ‘lo fedele consiglio de la ragione’ (VN II, 9), challenging the erotic fatalism associated with many of his contemporaries but especially with Guido Cavalcanti. Robert Harrison describes the work as an ‘act of independence’ from his Florentine contemporary and his insistence upon the incompatibility of love and rationality.61 Dante moves away from a clear dependence upon Cavalcanti (as well as Guittone and Guinizzelli) until his own distinctive poetic voice and understanding of love emerge. He ultimately claims to have formulated a love poetry in which he finds gratification not in the transitory greeting of Beatrice but in his own words of praise for her and the unfailing divine goodness that she embodies (‘quello che non mi puote venire meno’ [that which cannot fail me]: VN XVIII, 4). After her death, moreover, his desire extends into the eternal dimension, no longer fixated upon a mortal object but reaching towards the heavenly patria. In its treatment of earthly and divine love, the Vita nova is in many ways a product of Dante’s time, absorbing and fusing literary and theological discourses in speaking of love for the lady and meditating upon the relationship between that love and God. Like mystical theologians, lyric poets from Rudel to Guinizzelli, and commentators on the Song of Songs, Dante found in love poetry a worldly facsimile of the pilgrimage of desire undertaken by the Christian soul, while the use of a female figure linked to higher spiritual or intellectual aspirations was indebted not only to medieval love poetry and mariological writings, but also to the biblical figure of Sapientia and Boethius’s Lady Philosophy. In a sense, the work’s narrative trajectory is also conventional: Dante’s love is transformed from an egocentric and carnal love for Beatrice, contingent upon her reciprocation of his attention in space and time, to a form of love, following her death, which transcends those temporal and material confines to be oriented towards her Creator. Like many a Christian conversion narrative, the transition is from the temporal to the eternal, from the earthly to the heavenly city, from a fleshly love to caritas. 61 Harrison, p. 84. Most studies of the libello pay close attention to its handling of Dante’s ‘primo amico’. Specifically on its anti-Cavalcantian agenda, see for example R. Durling, ‘Guido Cavalcanti in the Vita nova’, in Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, ed. by M. L. Ardizzone (Florence: Cadmo, 2003), pp. 176–86; M. Gragnolati, ‘Rime trasformate e rime assenti: la performance della Vita nova e le figure di Dante e Cavalcanti’, in Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet, ed. by Z. G. Barański and M. L. McLaughlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 74–91; Harrison, pp. 69–90. The question of whether Guido’s definitive statement on love, the canzone ‘Donna me prega’, pre- or post-dates the Vita nova is a matter of debate. For two opposing views, see Malato, Dante e Guido Cavalcanti, and M. Marti, ‘Da “Donna me prega” a “Donne ch’avete”: non viceversa’, in Da Dante a Croce: proposte consensi dissensi (Galatina: Congedo, 2005), pp. 7–15.

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In other words, we can frame the Vita nova in terms of normative theological categories, reinforced by rhetorical, typological, and structural features of the work, as highlighted by critics such as Charles Singleton.62 But doing so too restrictively ignores the new and audacious claims that Dante makes for his beloved. While the prose of the libello attributes to Beatrice an allegorical significance and a Christological function in Dante’s life, she remains foremost a historical woman and retains her association with physical beauty and erotic love. Dante continues to insist, far more than do his religious and secular predecessors, upon the continuity between the sexual desire of his youth and the spiritual desire to which she will lead him. While his love transcends the lust that he suggests has blighted others’ poetry, we find no recantation of Dante’s commitment to this Florentine woman in his spiritual journey, no conversion away from the donna, but rather a gradual reappraisal of what she embodies. Indeed, as we shall see, the Vita nova polemically insists upon the primacy of love as a topic to be addressed in vernacular poetry (VN XXV, 4–6). The Vita nova is thus both a continuation of cultural trends during that era and a watershed, not only in its structural originality but also in the extent of its alignment of earthly and divine objects of desire.63 It proposes a new, boldly integrative solution to the moral tension at the heart of the lyric tradition. Its mode of conversion transcends, rather than reinforces, a dualistic lyric paradigm whereby the poet must choose between his beloved and God. In time, Dante’s treatment of the relationship between different forms of love undergoes a number of shifts and transformations. It is most strikingly variable in his uncompiled lyric poems (Rime). As we shall see in the second part of this book, while these at times endorse the kind of rational, spiritual love endorsed by the Vita nova, at others they describe a fatalistic and destructive experience of love more in tune with the poetry of Cavalcanti.64 Indeed, across his Rime such fatalism not only features but 62 The poetic and the theological aspects of the Vita nova’s account of Dante’s coming of age are documented, respectively, in the classic studies of D. De Robertis, Il libro della ‘Vita Nuova’, 2nd edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), and C. Singleton, An Essay on the ‘Vita Nuova’ (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). For a critique of the rigidity of the approaches of these critics and their respective Italian and American disciples, see Harrison, pp. 1–13. 63 As Lombardi puts it, Beatrice ‘is perhaps the clearest example of the integration of the two discourses: she simultaneously de-eroticizes earthly love and eroticizes God’ (Wings, p. 14). And later: ‘Beginning with the Vita Nuova, Dante radically merges the earthly and divine experiences and rhetoric of love, by constructing a framework of supernal reading, which acts as an invisible gloss to Dante’s own erotic text, making it, like the Song of Songs, already sacred, albeit intact in its eroticism’ (p. 173). 64 Barolini (‘Dante and Cavalcanti’) traces this Cavalcantian thread through Dante’s lyric corpus, which includes poems such as the ‘rime petrose’, the sonnet exchange with

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predominates, especially in the later years of his lyric production. It is the Convivio, however, of all Dante’s works between the Vita nova and Commedia, that elaborates most extensively upon the notion of desire. This unfinished treatise, written in the early years of Dante’s exile (c.1304–1307), seeks to introduce the literate uninitiated to the world of philosophical wisdom (Conv. I, i, 3–4) through a series of lengthy commentaries upon some of the poet’s vernacular canzoni, some dedicated to the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy (whom Dante claims was Beatrice’s rival in the later chapters of the libello, the ‘donna gentile’ [noble lady]). The Convivio shares certain similarities with the Vita nova. Each work uses a prosimetric structure that allows Dante to combine poetry and critical reflection and implicitly confers prestige upon his vernacular lyrics, which become a platform for interrogating weighty intellectual concerns. There are, however, important ideological differences between the two texts, not only in the evident contrast between their respective philosophical and theological foundations, but also in the disjuncture between their poetics and the ways in which they confront questions of love and desire. The wider conceptualization of desire in the two works is essentially consonant. We find the first of two detailed discussions of desire in the Convivio towards the end of Book III: E la ragione è questa: che con ciò sia cosa che ciascuna cosa naturalmente disia la sua perfezione, sanza quella essere non può contento, che è essere beato; ché quantunque l’altre cose avesse, sanza questa rimarebbe in lui desiderio; lo quale essere non può con la beatitudine, acciò che la beatitudine sia perfetta cosa e lo desiderio sia cosa defettiva; ché nullo desidera quello che ha, ma quello che non ha, che è manifesto difetto. (Conv. III, xv, 3) [The reason for this is that since everything by nature desires its own perfection, without this perfection man could not be happy, that is to say, could not be blessed; for even if he had every other thing, by lacking this perfection desire would still be present in him, and desire is something that cannot coexist with blessedness since blessedness is something perfect and desire something defective; for no one desires what he has but rather what he does not have, which is an obvious deficiency.]

Dante here expounds the Aristotelian notion that any being naturally desires its own perfection, which for humankind may be found only in beatitude. Until we reach heaven, our lives are defined by an innate sense of lack, which will be fulfilled only in the presence of God—the only Cino da Pistoia, and the ‘canzone montanina’. I have considered the Cavalcantian properties of the so-called ‘pargoletta’ sequence, in relation to the Commedia, in my essay ‘Dante’s Cavalcantian Relapse: The “Pargoletta” Sequence and the Commedia’, Dante Studies, 131 (2013), 73–97.

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legitimate telos of desire. Thus, desire for Dante, as for numerous medieval Christian thinkers, possesses an ambivalent status, both a by-product of man’s exile from Heaven and the road whereby he may return to the spiritual patria. Such a vision of desire had implicitly underpinned the Vita nova: Dante’s love for Beatrice was shown to be an expression of a supernal desire, born out of his separation from God, with which his love for her eventually became reconciled. Yet we shall see that such a reconciliation is not of interest to Dante in the Convivio. The work instead reaffirms more conventional and unyielding oppositions between eros and rationality, passion and temperance.65 The work’s lengthiest and most widely cited reflection on desire, from which I cite only an extract, comes in Book IV: Onde vedemo li parvuli desiderare massimamente un pomo; e poi, più procedendo, desiderare uno augellino; e poi, più oltre, desiderare bel vestimento; e poi lo cavallo; e poi una donna; e poi ricchezza non grande, e poi grande, e poi più. E questo incontra perché in nulla di queste cose truova quella che va cercando, e credela trovare più oltre. Per che vedere si può che l’uno desiderabile sta dinanzi all'altro alli occhi della nostra anima per modo quasi piramidale, che ’l minimo li cuopre prima tutti, ed è quasi punta dell’ultimo desiderabile, che è Dio, quasi base di tutti. (Conv. IV, xii, 16–17) [And so we see small children desiring above all else an apple; then, when they are somewhat older, desiring a little bird; then, later still, desiring fine clothes; then a horse; then a woman; then riches in small measure; then riches in greater measure; then even more riches. This happens because people find in none of these things what they are actually seeking, and think that they will find it a little way on. It may be gathered from this that, from the viewpoint of our soul, each desirable object stands in front of another in pyramid form, so that the smallest, coming first, covers all the others, and is the apex of the ultimate desirable object, God, who constitutes the base of all others.]

This passage closely follows Augustine’s distinction between uti and frui— between learning from earthly desires and merely enjoying them.66 While every Christian pilgrim, estranged from his Maker, is motivated by an 65 While my focus here is on what I regard as the Convivio’s restrictive and dualistic handling of Dante’s amatory poetry and erotic past, it should be noted that the treatise in other contexts contains neoplatonic elements and definitions of love as a unitive force. On the work’s grounding in neoplatonic theology, and the integration of philosophical and theological aspects, see for example P. Trovato, ‘Against Aristotle: Cosmological Vision in Dante’s Convivio’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 20 (2003), 31–46. 66 On the Augustinian nature of the Convivio’s meditation of desire, and its prefiguration of the Purgatorio, see Barolini, Undivine Comedy, pp. 99–121; ‘Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia me reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’, in Dante and the Origins, pp. 47–69.

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innate desire, this can take two forms: the one, directed only towards God, will lead to fulfilment; the other, directed towards ephemeral goods valued only as ends in themselves, will merely generate further desire. Among the worldly objects that can enslave the desiring subject of the Convivio— situated between the ‘cavallo’ and the more sinister ‘richezza’ in the sequence above—is the ‘donna’, as earthly love is lumped with avarice in a chain of aberrant, cupidinous desires.67 In the Vita nova desire for the donna had crucially been afforded a redemptive, as well as a corruptive, capacity. Yet the Convivio consistently reduces love for the (nonallegorical) lady and moral probity to a more rigid opposition. The shift is subtle but important. As Gary Cestaro notes, the Convivio ‘hew[s] closely to a classical paradigm of gender and development’;68 one, that is, that continually reinforces an opposition between desire and reason and runs contrary to the Vita nova’s carefully conceived integration. This tendency is apparent in the Convivio’s very first chapter, where Dante discusses the relationship between the ethical Convivio and the amatory Vita nova: E se nella presente opera, la quale è Convivio nominata e vo’ che sia, più virilmente trattasse che nella Vita nova, 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. Ché altro si conviene e dire e operare ad una etade che ad altra; per che certi costumi sono idonei e laudabili ad una etade che sono sconci e biasimevoli ad altra, sì come di sotto, nel quarto trattato di questo libro, sarà propia ragione mostrata. E io in quella dinanzi, all’entrata della mia gioventute parlai, e in questa dipoi, quella già trapassata. (Conv. I, i, 16–17) [If in the present work, which is called Convivio, as I wish it to be, the subject is treated more maturely than in the Vita nova, I do not intend by this in any way to disparage that book but rather more greatly to support it with this one, seeing that it understandably suits that one to be fervid and passionate, and this one to be temperate and mature. For, different actions and words befit different ages; and certain deeds are praiseworthy at one age that are inappropriate an another, as will be explained in Book IV of this work. And the Vita nova was written only on the cusp of manhood, whereas this work is the product of maturity.] 67

For Barolini, ‘Dante implies here that desire for social advancement underpins many of our individual desires, and suggests that it ultimately commodifies them; the objects of desire he lists here are commodities precisely to the degree that their attainment serves to measure our position on the social scale’ (‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 56). The closing ‘poi più’ of the list cited, meanwhile, is seen to adumbrate the endless craving of the Commedia’s shewolf (ibid.). 68 G. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2003), p. 73.

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The carefully calibrated relationship between the two works serves, on the one hand, to harmonize them and to construct an exemplary model of authorial development. Dante is also careful elsewhere to proclaim his loyalty to the memory of ‘quella Beatrice beata che vive in cielo colli angeli e in terra colla mia anima’ [that blessed Beatrice who lives in heaven with the angels and on earth with my soul] (Conv. II, ii, 1). All the same, while Dante’s treatment of the Vita nova is not straightforwardly palinodic, we certainly see the earlier work belittled. The Convivio predicates the path to rectitude and maturity on surpassing the ‘fervid and passionate’ love of the Vita nova and espousing more muscular ethical, political, and philosophical themes. Such a description of the libello, confined to the sphere of youthful passion, does it a disservice, for its innovation was precisely that it was not ‘fervid and passionate’ and that love and temperance could, in fact, transcend the kind of opposition that Dante sets out here. Much the same tendency emerges in the Convivio’s handling of Dante’s pre-existing amatory canzoni ‘Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’ [You whose intellect the third sphere moves] and ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ [Love that speaks to me within my mind]. Dante insists that these love poems, and those for the ‘donna gentile’ in the Vita nova, were written not for a flesh-and-blood woman, but for the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy, and his exposition of them seeks to rid him of the charges of infidelity to Beatrice that he fears they may otherwise bring: ‘Temo la infamia di tanta passione avere seguita, quanta concepe chi legge le sopra nominate canzoni in me avere segnoreggiata’ [I fear the infamy of having yielded myself to so great a passion that anyone who reads the canzoni mentioned above must believe once ruled me] (Conv. I, ii, 16).69 In playing down these poems’ literal sense (dismissed elsewhere as a ‘bella menzogna’ [beautiful fiction]: Conv. II, i, 3) Dante’s language is again strikingly dualistic, establishing a dichotomy between ‘passione’ and ‘vertù’ (Conv. I, ii. 16) that corresponds to the line drawn between the ‘impassioned’ Vita nova and the ‘temperate’ Convivio in the treatise’s opening chapter. The Convivio, in other words, plots amatory and ethical content against one another, as the affective character of the Vita nova is replaced by a more narrowly rationalistic emphasis, while love poetry 69

The question of whether the poems for Lady Philosophy in the Vita nova and Convivio were originally written for a real woman cannot be resolved conclusively. There is, however, nothing in the Vita nova to encourage an allegorical interpretation and most commentators on Dante’s lyrics suggest she probably began life as a real (or imagined-to-bereal) woman. For helpful summaries of the question, and the inconsistencies surrounding the treatment of the figure between the Vita nuova and the Convivio, see D. Cervigni, ‘Donna gentile of the Vita Nuova’, and J. Took, ‘Lady Philosophy’, both in DE, pp. 316–18 and 551–3.

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serves only as a means of exalting philosophy, in which Dante found Boethian solace in the years following Beatrice’s death. This emphasis is also in seen in Dante’s linguistic treatise, the De vulgari eloquentia (c.1303–1305), where he delineates the three subjects worthy of treatment in the ‘volgare illustre’ [illustrious vernacular]: ‘armorum probitas’ [prowess in arms], ‘amoris accensio’ [ardour in love], and ‘directio voluntatis’ [control of one’s will] (DVE II, ii, 8). Of these, the most noble is ethics (‘directio voluntatis’), since it alone pertains to the rational part of the tripartite Aristotelian soul. Love, meanwhile, though still a worthy theme, is classified as inferior to and distinct from ethics on account of its association with the sensitive soul. Thus, Dante again draws a line between love and ethics and presents the former as an inherently appetitive phenomenon (‘secundum quod animale’ [in so far as we are animal]: II, ii, 6), reneging, moreover, on his earlier conviction, articulated in the Vita nova, that vernacular poetry should always be the product of love. In Dante’s Vita nova and Convivio, then, we observe two opposing tendencies with regard to the role and value ascribed to earthly love: first, in the libello, we find a radical alignment of erotic and spiritual forms of desire and an attempt to redeem his secular vocation as a vernacular love poet; later, in the Convivio, we find a more conventional delineation of eros and its relationship to reason and moral rectitude. Nevertheless, the two works point to a shared concern with innovatively splicing love poetry and moral content: the Vita nova by redeeming love poetry itself; the Convivio by applying a form of allegory to Dante’s love poems that extracts from them any potentially negative erotic associations. In each instance Dante is concerned with remaining faithful to love as his creative source, while stripping amatory verse of its moral ambiguity. The question this raises is why Dante, an author so manifestly concerned with the moral validity and utility of his writing, remains so loyal to a form of writing that, as we have seen, was morally contentious from a Christian perspective. Why, in search of a more spiritually viable form of writing, did he not simply cut his ties to the love lyric, following a mode of conversion exemplified by a precursor such as Guittone d’Arezzo? To answer this question we must take a step back and realize that at stake is not only Dante’s understanding of love and desire, but a number of other issues that directly impacted on his ambitions as a writer. The tension between eros and spirituality was, for Dante, entangled with further cultural dialectics, particularly between cultural authority and subjectivity, and between vernacular language and Latin. His complex treatment of love, and his unswerving commitment to it, needs to be viewed through each of these lenses.

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1.2 AUTHORITY AND SUBJECTIVITY Throughout Dante’s oeuvre we witness his attempts to harmonize different aspects of his complex and multifaceted cultural inheritance. Evidently, Dante was not merely the product of Italian literary culture, but was shaped by a range of cultural traditions that feed into his writing and intersect in dynamic and innovative ways. His tendency is not to move between diverse traditions and genres, but to splice them, breaking down the barriers between different levels of culture that restricted his own possibilities as a writer.70 As explored by Albert Russell Ascoli in particular, one of the constants of this incessant experimentation is Dante’s attempt to appropriate for his own writing a form of cultural authority ordinarily reserved for a small number of biblical, theological, and classical texts, which received a great deal of attention from medieval commentators.71 Dante sought this form of authority not simply by imitating these works, but by fusing the modalities of Latin exegetical culture with those of the Romance lyric tradition in which he established himself as a poet—a lyric tradition that, in its use of the vernacular and its secular origins, occupied a lower cultural status. Dante’s pursuit of cultural authority is thus conducted very much on his own terms. For all that he eventually embraces weighty philosophical, theological, and political themes, and for all that he engages with and imitates the revered authors of the classical world, he does so without forsaking his mother tongue and his identity as a love poet. The pilgrim of the Commedia may be shepherded by Virgil, and later by Bernard of Clairvaux, but at the poem’s core is the vernacular muse whom he first encountered as a boy on the streets of Florence. He may fashion himself as a Christian Virgil, joining the select band of epic poets in Inferno IV (‘ch’e’ sì mi fecer de la loro schiera, / sì ch’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno’ [for they made me one of their company, so that I became the sixth among such

70 On the endlessly ‘experimental’ character of Dante’s oeuvre in relation to medieval literary theory and practice, see for example: Z. G. Barański, ‘Dante Alighieri: Experimentation and (Self-)exegesis’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume II: The Middle Ages, ed. by A. Minnis and I. Johnson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 561–82; and ‘Dante and Medieval Poetics’, in Iannucci, ed., Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 3–22. 71 On Dante and auctoritas, see A. R. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); G. Stabile, ‘Autore’ and ‘Autorità’, in ED, I, 454–60. Auctoritas was the preserve of ‘a limited number of classical texts that [had] accrued cultural capital and with it the status of guarantors of truth and models of imitation over the centuries’ (Ascoli, p. 7).

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wisdom]: lines 101–2) but he also remains the poetic son of Guinizzelli (‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior . . .’ [father to me and to others, my betters]: Purg. XXVI, 97–8). This attempt to encompass different cultural traditions within his writing, seeking ‘high’ cultural authority while remaining rooted in a nascent vernacular tradition, entails a continual process of negotiation between distinct cultural frameworks and value systems. In particular, it entails a negotiation between two very different forms of authority, for—as we shall see—what constitutes an ‘authoritative’ writer in the context of Latin exegetical culture is very different from what constitutes an ‘authoritative’ writer in the context of vernacular lyric poetry—a tension that feeds into his innovative handling of love. While the two hundred years prior to Dante’s emergence as a poet had hosted an unprecedented flourishing of vernacular literary culture, Latin in many ways remained dominant. The study of Latin language and classical literature, gramatica, remained the first discipline of the trivium and the bedrock of medieval schooling. It was overwhelmingly the language of institutional discourse—of the Church, law, rhetoric, medicine, theology, philosophy, and exegesis (though vernacular innovations were emerging in all these areas)—and was bound up with a weighty and pervasive notion of cultural authority. The acquisition of Latin was, moreover, seen as heralding a child’s surpassing of maternal, affective infancy, and dependence upon the vernacular, and entry into the patriarchal social order.72 The most prevalent form of Latin literary activity in the later Middle Ages was the commentary tradition, nurtured by the scholastics, which flourished between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.73 This tradition 72 ‘When a student entered the ranks of the litterati through the grammatical curriculum, he or she was learning far more than the obvious subject matter of the discipline: a student was being inducted into a whole social system, internalizing the structures of authority that were reproduced and guaranteed by grammatica’: M. Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 21. See also S. Lusignan, Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles, 2nd edn (Paris: Vrin, 1987), p. 87; W. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 113–41. 73 My discussion of authority and exegesis here is indebted to the following key studies: J. B. Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), and The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971); Ascoli; J. Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the ‘Libro de buen amor’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); V. Gillespie, ‘The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, in Minnis and Johnson, eds, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, pp. 145–235; Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. by A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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enshrined the notion of auctoritas: a form of authority possessed by certain writers (auctores), which rendered them not only worthy of imitation, but also sources of ethical guidance.74 Indeed, so tightly intertwined were writing and morality that commentators in the accessus ad auctores tradition invariably assigned fictive texts to the field of ethics. Judson Boyce Allen goes as far as to state that: To define ethics in medieval terms is to define poetry, and to define poetry is to define ethics, because medieval ethics was so much under the influence of a literary paideia as to be enacted poetry, and poetry was so practically received as to be quite directly the extended examples for real behaviour.75

The role of the reader, in carrying out exegesis, was an ethical operation, separating the ‘hidden sentential wheat from the fictive chaff ’.76 Naturally, therefore, the most commented-upon and ‘authoritative’ text of the period was the Bible.77 More surprising is that this profoundly moralistic literary culture also began to regard classical, pagan writings as sources of moral guidance as well as linguistic imitation. The exposition of ancient works was largely restricted to a process of ‘moralization’, with exegetes sometimes pushed to extreme lengths to superimpose a moral dimension onto what were, in a Christian context, morally contentious texts, in order to underline their utility and legitimize their inclusion in the canon.78 It is no coincidence that auctoritas was associated with Latin, a form of language that could overcome the vagaries of personal and regional practice, for the work of the auctor was believed to contain truths that, as 1998); A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Wildwood house, 1984); S. Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Dante’s early commentators, see Z. G. Barański, ‘Chiosar con altro testo’: leggere Dante nel Trecento (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2001); S. Botterill, ‘The Trecento Commentaries on Dante’s Commedia’, in Minnis and Johnson, eds, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, pp. 590–611; Minnis and Scott, pp. 439–519. 74 This twofold definition of auctoritas is supported by Dante in Conv. IV, vi, 3–5. Dante follows two of the three roots suggested in Hugutio of Pisa’s Magnae Derivationes: the Greek autentin (‘worthy of faith and obedience’) and the Latin auieo (‘to bind words’). 75 Allen, Ethical Poetic, p. 12. See also Reynolds: ‘one might even say that being ethicus [was] a necessary qualification for being an author (an auctor) at all’ (p. 15). 76 Gillespie, p. 157. See also P. Delhaye, ‘L’Enseignement de la Philosophie Morale au XII Siècle’, Medieval Studies, 11 (1949), 77–99. 77 On scriptural exegesis, see especially B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); H. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quattre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1961). 78 ‘Even texts as salacious as Ovid’s Art of Love had to be squared with this idea. . . . In the words of one glossator, the Art of Love pertains to ethics because it speaks of the behaviour of young girls, that is the sort of morals they should have and how [these morals] might be retained’: Reynolds, p. 15.

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Ascoli writes, ‘transcended the limitations of the historical contingency— being valid in any time or place’.79 The very concept of auctoritas ‘subordinated the individual to the transhistorical and the impersonal’ and was thus at odds with ‘modern concepts of individual creative personality’.80 This applied not only to classical auctores, but also the human authors of Scripture, whose role was secondary to that of the divine Auctor.81 Some critics have even argued that the creative human ‘author’ was, in effect, nonexistent in the Latin Middle Ages, since the moral interpretation of ‘authoritative’ texts made the historical author wholly subordinate to commentators, whose normative reading of a text ultimately generated its meaning.82 It is easy to regard this exegetical culture as intrinsically ‘anti-literary’, insofar as it suppressed the human author and rendered poetry subordinate to ethics, often to the extent that the formal and affective properties of texts were ignored.83 Such a view is often supported by the fact the most influential scholastic voices, above all Thomas Aquinas, were dismissive of poetry and sceptical as to its moral and intellectual value, Thomas famously branding it the lowest of all forms of study (‘infima inter omnes doctrinas’).84 Nevertheless, scholars have increasingly shown how subtle shifts in exegetical practices in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries heralded important changes in attitudes towards literature and the human author. In his work on medieval authorship, Alastair Minnis has shown that biblical commentators during this period placed increasing emphasis on the activity of the human author and the literal sense of the text, thus reducing the allegorizing influence of the lector and transferring agency to the writer. More attention was accordingly paid to the formal features of Scriptural texts, and Minnis argues that this impacted upon approaches to pagan authors, who similarly began to be read with greater attention paid to poetic techniques.85 79

80 Ascoli, p. 7. Ascoli, p. 6. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 36–9. 82 See Allen, Ethical Poetic; Dagenais. For a survey of critical responses to this question, see Ascoli, pp. 29–44. 83 This was certainly the view of the many twentieth-century scholars, who, as noted by Minnis and Johnson, altogether ignored the Middle Ages when exploring the history of literary criticism and posited a stark opposition between medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism. See Minnis and Johnson’s introduction to their Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, p. 2. 84 ST 1a, q. 1, a. 9, obj. 1. 85 See especially Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, but also Allen, The Friar as Critic, pp. 2–3; G. R. Evans, ‘Exegesis and Authority in the Thirteenth Century’, in ‘Ad Litteram’: Authoritative Texts and Medieval Readers, ed. by K. Emery and M. D. Jordan (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 43–111; Nasti, pp. 9–13. Minnis and Scott argue that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ‘it was the scholastic 81

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The exegetical culture that safeguarded auctoritas was a crucial touchstone for Dante, who frequently adopted its methods in his attempts to confer authority onto his own vernacular production. This was an operation of no little audacity. For all that medieval notions of authority and authorship were evolving, in theory Dante’s own access to such authority was, to say the least, highly circumscribed.86 Indeed, his obstacles to authority were not merely socio-historical but encompassed the very content of Dante’s writing, for the amatory focus of the literary tradition to which he pledged allegiance, the vernacular lyric, was at odds with the notion of auctoritas. Medieval exegetes were deeply censorious of earthly love. Classical love literature (for instance Ovid’s account of Orpheus and Eurydice or Virgil’s account of the love of Dido and Aeneas) was radically allegorized by commentators and its erotic dimension suppressed.87 But where eros and auctoritas were all but incompatible in the Latin commentary tradition, vernacular poets, as noted above, frequently stressed the link in their writing between ‘authoritative’ lyric poetry and the experience of erotic love, identifying this nexus, a trope of medieval Romance literature, as the very hallmark of poetic worth. We might think of chapter III of Dante’s Vita nova, where ‘famosi trovatori’ [famous poets] and ‘fedeli d’amore’ [love’s faithful subjects] are one and the same (VN III, 9). As well as the contrasting ways in which they handled the subject of love, the models of authorship associated with these two traditions also differed sharply. While the exegetical tradition tended to suppress the particularity of the historical author in illuminating the universal truths his writing might be seen to contain, vernacular lyric poetry probes the affective modulations of an ephemeral self. While acknowledging the difficulty and elusiveness of the term, theorists of the lyric invariably stress philosophers and theologians who set the pace for speculation concerning many literary matters, and made significant advances in the techniques of textual exposition. They produced a critical vocabulary which enabled the authors, materials, styles, structures, and effects of scriptural texts to be considered thoroughly, and which encourage the emergence in the fourteenth century of a more liberal attitude to classical poetry’ (p. 4). The two critics continue: ‘For something of the new status which had been afforded to scriptural poetry and to the poetic and rhetorical modes employed throughout Scripture in general, seems to have rubbed off on secular poetry. Scriptural authors were being read literally, with close attention being paid to those poetic methods believed to be part of the literal sense; pagan poets, long acknowledged as masters of those same methods, were being read allegorically or “moralized”—and thus the twain could meet’ (ibid.). 86 As Ascoli summarizes: ‘as a lay figure in a culture still dominated by clerics, a scion of a family on the fringes of the aristocracy, without the standing conferred by public office, he had no claim whatsoever to institutionally derived authority’ (p. 9). 87 See A. J. Minnis, ‘Amor and Auctoritas in the Self-Commentary of Dante and Francesco da Barberino’, Poetica, 32 (1990), 25–42.

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its fundamental association with the affective and the interior world.88 This is not, of course, to downplay the considerable complexity surrounding questions of subjectivity and authenticity in medieval poetry, and the difference between medieval and post-Romantic notions of the lyric. For all that medieval love poets claim spontaneity and authenticity, the ‘I’ of their verse is of course highly constructed, tightly bound by lexical, formal, and thematic conventions. Some critics have argued that viewing the ‘I’ of medieval lyric poetry as an individual, autobiographical voice is inherently anachronistic, since meaning was located in the reader’s identification with a normative poetic voice.89 This view has been justified by reference to the proliferation of anonymous vernacular texts in the Middle Ages, the performative nature of troubadour poetry, and the textual instability created by medieval manuscript culture. Others have challenged this view, however, identifying an important subjective dimension in both Occitan and Italian lyric poetry. Sarah Kay, for example, notes the increasing presence of historical details in troubadour poetry and emphasizes the role of the biographical vidas and razos in establishing the author’s existence in the real world,90 while Olivia Holmes shows how collections of Italian poetry such as Guittone’s lyric corpus and Dante’s Vita nova seek to overcome the limitations of manuscript transmission to create a historically determined ‘I’ that begins to correlate with a modern conception of the author.91 Taking into account such debates and complexities surrounding the medieval lyric, it would nevertheless be difficult to deny that 88 Hegel defines the lyric as ‘the expression of subjectivity’: G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 267. For a helpful overview of debates surrounding definitions of the lyric, see S. Brewster, Lyric: The New Critical Idiom (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), esp. pp. 1–42. Brewster stresses the consistent emphasis on the subjective in definitions of the lyric (‘a concentrated expression of individual emotion’: p. 1) while also noting its intersubjective character, especially in its association with music and performance. This intersubjective quality is especially pronounced in medieval Romance poetry, whether in terms of the performed poems of the troubadours or the dialogic forms associated with the early Italian lyric such as the tenzone. 89 See especially L. Spitzer, ‘Note on the Poetic and Empirical “I” in Medieval Authors’, Traditio, 4 (1946), 414–22. Spitzer’s stance is reaffirmed by Zumthor, who sees medieval authorship as fundamentally depersonalized: see P. Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 90 See S. Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1990). 91 See O. Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Giunta further argues that the Vita nova marks an important fusion of Spitzer’s categories of the ‘poetic I’ (an ‘I’ that stands for humankind in general) and the ‘empirical I’ (an ‘I’ that stands for the specific poet in a particular time and place): see C. Giunta, Versi a un destinatario: Saggio sulla poesia italiana nel Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino 2002), pp. 384–92. See also P. Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Form of

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all of Dante’s works are invested in constructing a very particularized ‘I’. It is clear, moreover, that vernacular love poetry more broadly privileged the subjective, private, and particular over the institutional, public, and universal, and revelled in an affective dimension that auctoritas continued to downplay. Dante was, in short, negotiating between a Latin commentary tradition, where the personal was suppressed and subordinated to the universal, and a vernacular lyric tradition, a poetry of the ‘I’, where the personal was a sine qua non. However, just as notions of authorship and authority in the commentary tradition had begun to acquire greater complexity, there were changes afoot in vernacular culture that were rendering cultural practices more flexible and pointing towards greater dialogue between religious and secular—and Latin and vernacular—traditions. As noted in the previous section, there was substantial interplay between secular love poetry and religious sources, while intellectual achievements associated with Latin discourses, such as philosophy, optics, medicine, law, and rhetoric, were brought to bear upon the writings of vernacular love poets.92 Guido Cavalcanti’s vernacular canzone ‘Donna me prega’, a dense philosophical disquisition on the nature of love, would receive extensive Latin commentary,93 while Brunetto Latini used his encyclopedic vernacular works the Tesoretto and Trésor to impart high culture to the burgeoning mercantile classes, and translated classical works, notably parts of Cicero’s rhetorical corpus, into Italian. Thus, while medieval literary culture appears, at first glance, to be fundamentally dichotomized—between the authoritative and the subjective, Latin and the vernacular, the religious and the secular—these oppositions were, by the late thirteenth century, gaining a new sort of complexity, and would be probed and manipulated with great acumen by writers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Ascoli states: ‘Dynamic historical forces were at work that provided a contemporary writer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, such as Dante, with the impetus and some of the resources to approach these categories creatively and transformatively.’94 The Vita nova is Dante’s first attempt to appropriate for his own vernacular writing a new form of cultural influence and prestige. This is the Mixed Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 84–117; C. Lee, La soggettività nel Medioevo (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1996), pp. 5–44. 92 ‘In viewing human love sub specie aeternitatis [poets] showed the scope and comprehensiveness of vision which vernacular poetics could possess, and thereby lost the subversive part in the scientific whole, emotion retreating before academic authorship’: Minnis, ‘Amor and auctoritas’, p. 28. 93 On Guido’s status as an auctoritas, see Barański, ‘Per similitudine’. 94 Ascoli, p. 10.

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most evident in the work’s prosimetric structure. As well as allowing Dante to impose a particular order and idealized narrative upon his preexisting lyrics, and to overcome the vagaries associated with their manuscript transmission, it sees him associate his own poetic production with the exegetical practices normally applied to texts written in Latin and deemed to possess authority.95 Its form, combining erotic poetry, narrative prose, and expository and theologizing exegesis, recalls glossed medieval editions of classical and scriptural texts, especially Ovid’s Remedia amoris96 and the Song of Songs,97 implying that Dante’s lyrics possess a weight of meaning that renders them worthy of exposition and a capacity to transmit profound moral and spiritual truths. Like its innovative treatment of love, this novel structure is indebted to cultural trends in this period: in this case, the greater attention paid by commentators to the historical author and the softening of the oppositions between Latin and the vernacular and between religious and secular cultural activity. Yet it is nevertheless revolutionary in its application of theologizing (self-)exegesis to vernacular love poetry and its very overt pursuit of auctoritas. This concern with authority is not confined to the work’s structure. In Vita nova XXV, for instance, Dante justifies his own use of prosopopoeia with direct reference to a number of classical auctores, not only to elevate the status of his own writing but also to emphasize the continuity between texts ancient and modern, Latin and vernacular. Similarly, he includes a significant number of Latin and especially biblical fragments in his vernacular prose, creating an impression ‘of a fluid, “unproblematic” interchangeability between the two languages, an exchange between equals’,98 while also applying the label ‘poeta’, ordinarily accorded only to the classical auctores, to contemporary, vernacular writers (VN XXV, 4).99 95

See Ascoli, pp. 175–201; Barański, ‘Experimentation and (Self-)exegesis’, pp. 564–8; M. Picone, ‘La teoria dell’Auctoritas nella Vita nuova’, Tenzone, 6 (2006), 173–91; T. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 44–117. Critics have also linked the prosimetrum to the structure of troubadour songbooks, whose biographical vidas and razos similarly framed the poems in expository prose: see D. De Robertis, introduction to VN, pp. 14–15; P. V. Mengaldo, ‘Oc’, in ED, IV, 111–17 (p. 113); Picone, ‘La tradizione romanza’, in ‘Vita nuova’ e tradizione romanza, pp. 27–72 (p. 35). 96 See M. Picone, ‘L’Ovidio di Dante’, in Dante e la ‘bella scola’ della poesia, ed. by A. A. Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 51–73 (pp. 56–8). 97 See Nasti, pp. 43–85. 98 Z. G. Barański, ‘The Roots of Dante’s Plurilingualism: “Hybridity” and Language in the Vita nova’, in Dante’s Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. by S. Fortuna, M. Gragnolati, and J. Trabant (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 98–121 (p. 113). 99 ‘E non è molto numero d’anni passati, che appariro prima questi poete volgari; ché dire per rima in volgare tanto è quanto dire per versi in latino, secondo alcuna proporzione’

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This pursuit of authority is not, however, carried out at the expense of Dante’s identity as a vernacular lyric poet. Dante is continually negotiating between two, seemingly conflicting forms of authority: one that associated literary value with moral and spiritual content and suppressed eros and subjectivity (even in erotic texts such as the Song of Songs), and another that situated it in a submission to love and a profound understanding of its effects on the individual subject.100 For late medieval commentators, authority was predicated on universally applicable ethical content; for vernacular lyric poets, it was predicated on the singular and highly intimate experience of desire. The Vita nova’s innovative attempt to redeem the poet-lover’s subordination to his beloved is thus entwined with a more ambitious and far-reaching cultural operation that concerns Dante throughout his career—that of fusing Latin and vernacular traditions. In so doing, he seeks to authorize the affective and personalize the authoritative, manipulating the cultural categories of his time to formulate a more elastic mode of authorship, one capable of drawing more liberally upon the resources of his culture and adding unprecedented weight to his own vernacular writing. Chapter XXV of the Vita nova encapsulates these tensions. It emphasizes the continuity and compatibility between ancient literature and Dante’s own while also recounting the history of his nascent Romance tradition. It declares Amor to be the vernacular poet’s required subject matter while also tracing the roots of that theme to Latin poetry.101 The Convivio intensifies the Vita nova’s attempts to appropriate authority.102 Once again, its prose commentary aims to lend greater stature to Dante’s vernacular lyrics. Now, however, the poems prompt reflection on [It is only recently that the first poets appeared who wrote in the vernacular; I call them ‘poets’ because to compose rhymed verse in the vernacular is more or less the same as to compose poetry in Latin using classical meters] (VN XXV, 4). 100 On the related question of the Vita nova’s attempts to mediate between autobiographical and typological dimensions, see M. Picone, ‘La Vita Nuova fra autobiografia e tipologia’, in Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi, ed. by M. Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1987), pp. 59–69. 101 ‘A cotale cosa dichiarare, secondo che è buono a presente, prima è da intendere che anticamente non erano dicitori d’amore in lingua volgare, anzi erano dicitori d’amore certi poete in lingua latina; tra noi dico, avvegna forse che tra altra gente addivenisse, e addivegna ancora, sì come in Grecia, non volgari ma litterati poete queste cose trattavano’ [To clarify this matter suitably for my purpose, I shall begin by saying that, formerly, there were no love poets writing in the vernacular, the only love poets were those writing in Latin: among us (and this probably happened in other nations as it still happens in the case of Greece) it was not vernacular poets but learned poets who wrote about love] (VN XXV, 3). 102 On the Convivio and auctoritas, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making, esp. pp. 201–26; Z. G. Barański, ‘Il Convivio e la poesia: problemi di definizione’, in Contesti della Commedia: Lectura Dantis Fridericiana 2002–2003, ed. by F. Tateo and D. M. Pegorari (Bari: Palomar, 2004), pp. 9–64; Minnis, ‘Amor and Auctoritas’, pp. 26–35.

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wider-ranging topics, encompassing philosophy, cosmology, ethics, and politics. Even more than the libello, the Convivio attempts to establish a greater fluidity between vernacular and Latin culture, to show that a vernacular poet can be read in the same manner as a classical auctor, and to raise the status of poetry itself, whose epistemological value was questioned at this time.103 The work ostensibly probes a dichotomy between authority and subjectivity, in the hope of realizing Dante’s ultimate objective of spiritually redeeming and culturally authorizing his activity as a vernacular poet and—as Ascoli has shown—integrating the categories of ‘authority’ and ‘personality’. Yet, for all that the Convivio fuses vernacular poetry and expository prose, it ultimately immerses itself much more fully in the modalities of medieval exegesis,104 in thrall to the structures of authority that it would apparently aim to subvert. This intense preoccupation with authority impacts upon the more restrictive handling of earthly love outlined above. Poems are no longer treated as testament to the spiritual or erotic awakening of the individual, but rather serve as a platform for expounding upon more abstract and impersonal themes. As we saw in the previous section, love as erotic experience is all but exorcized from Dante’s poetry, as it would be by a Latin commentator. The distance between the (false) literal and the (substantive) allegorical sense of Dante’s poems, as they are expounded in the treatise, corresponds to the distance between love and rectitude that the Convivio endorses, as desire is configured according to a more conventional and dualistic paradigm. Indeed, in Book IV, the subject of Dante’s exegetical attention is the doctrinal canzone ‘Le dolci rime’, where amatory content is explicitly set aside (‘Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia / cercar ne miei pensieri, / convien ch’io lasci’ [The tender rhymes of love I once sought out within my thoughts I must now leave]: 1–3) and the generic ‘omo’ (‘dirò del valore / per lo qual omo è gentile’ [I will speak about the quality that makes a person truly noble]: 12–13) replaces the individual poet-lover. This canzone, as I shall discuss in Chapter 3, is the moment in Dante’s lyric corpus most easily reconciled with the Convivio’s broader movement away from a poetics of subjectivity and desire towards depersonalized abstraction. The treatise promotes a more virile, classicizing, and straightforwardly rationalistic poetics than the Vita nova and Commedia. Its claims are founded not in the revelation that may be gleaned in the experience of love, but in the writings of the authorities whom Dante cites with ever greater insistence, and it is perhaps in part 103

See Barański, ‘Il Convivio e la poesia’, pp. 41–59. On the text’s adoption of these modalities, see for example P. Trovato, ‘Il primo trattato del Convivio visto alla luce dell’accessus ad auctores’, Misure critiche, 6 (1976), 5–14. 104

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owing to his dissatisfaction with this mode of expression that the treatise comes to be abandoned. As with the question of love, then, the Vita nova and Convivio offer approaches to the question of authority that show certain continuities (a splicing of amatory and ethical content, the deployment of self-exegesis, the transparent pursuit of authority and challenging of cultural binaries) while also displaying tensions that point to the difficulties facing Dante as a poet negotiating between different traditions and forms of authority. The Vita nova begins under the auspices of a tyrannical eros and ends with a somewhat fragile form of harmony established between lyric poetry and spiritual responsibility. Its narrative contains a number of relapses, not least in the episode of the ‘donna gentile’ (VN XXXV–XXXVIII), and concludes in a strikingly open-ended fashion.105 By contrast, the Convivio moves away from that subjectivity, and away from love, in tending towards a kind of cultural authority that requires ever more authorial self-effacement. The two texts are, in different ways, confronting the same questions with regard to love and authority. On the one hand: how does Dante remain faithful to love and to the vernacular lyric while taking on the mantle of auctor? On the other: how does he espouse the universal and transhistorical concerns associated with auctoritas without diluting that very service to love? Neither work provides a wholly convincing answer: the Vita nova points to its own limitations, while the Convivio is left unfinished. The Vita nova is, in effect, more innovative in its handling of love but more thematically restrictive; the Convivio, more thematically capacious yet more ideologically conservative.

1.3 VERNACULAR AND LATIN We have seen how Dante’s negotiation of different forms of love in the Vita nova and Convivio is thus entwined with his attempts to appropriate authority for his work while retaining the subjective dimension associated with vernacular lyric poetry. But this latter association, and the very question of vernacular language, which appear integral to Dante’s erotic commitment, need to be further examined. First, why does Dante remain faithful to a historically and geographically determined form of language 105 ‘Appresso questo sonetto apparve a me una mirabile visione, ne la quale io vidi cose che mi fecero proporre di non dire più di questa benedetta infino a tanto che io potesse più degnamente trattare di lei’ [After I wrote this sonnet there came to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessèd one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way] (VN XLII, 1).

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that immediately compromises his access to authority? Second, why is this form of language so strongly associated with the subjective, affective dimension with which Latin is often seen to be at odds? Auctoritas would have been more straightforwardly available to Dante had he rejected the vernacular outright and followed a starker model of conversion, abandoning the morally tainted realm of love poetry. Yet he would seem to attach a unique and particular value to love poetry in the mother tongue. Dante first insists upon the intimate association of love and vernacular poetry in Chapter XXV of the Vita nova, where, as alluded to above, he renders explicit his commitment to what he terms the ‘matera amorosa’— the theme of love. In an important passage, which, as I shall address in Chapter 3, implicitly critiques both the poetics and popularity of Guittone, Dante delineates the narrow thematic horizons available to the vernacular lyric: E segno che sia picciolo tempo, è che se volemo cercare in lingua d’oco e in quella di sì, noi non troviamo cose dette anzi lo presente tempo per cento e cinquanta anni. E la cagione per che alquanti grossi ebbero fama di sapere dire, è che quasi fuoro li primi che dissero in lingua di sì. E lo primo che cominciò a dire sì come poeta volgare, si mosse però che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere li versi latini. E questo è contra coloro che rimano sopra altra matera che amorosa, con ciò sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore. (VN XXV, 4–6) [And proof that it is but a short time since these vernacular poets first appeared is the fact that if we look into the Provençal and the Italian literature, we shall not find any poems written more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The reason why a few ungifted poets acquired the fame of knowing how to compose is that they were the first who wrote poetry in the Italian language. The first poet to begin writing in the vernacular was moved to do so by a desire to make his words understandable to ladies who found Latin verses difficult to understand. And this is an argument against those who compose in the vernacular on a subject other than love, since composition in the vernacular was from the beginning intended for treating of love.]

There is little of substance here to account for the important bond between the vernacular and the theme of love. Rather, Dante states that the contemporary vernacular poet should respect a convention established by his forebears, who used the vernacular, rather than Latin, so that the female recipients of their poetry could understand them. Dante’s justification for his erotic commitment in the Vita nova is neither a complex nor revolutionary one. Nonetheless, what is justified in these conventional terms becomes the source of the work’s most unorthodox operations.

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Dante’s reflection on the vernacular and its relationship to love and selfhood acquires depth and complexity over time. It becomes a key feature of his work, especially in the De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio— works deeply concerned with language and its role not only in the social world but also in relation to the divine. Dante sees language as a qualifying feature of humanity: angels, able to partake in God’s divine intelligence, are able to communicate wordlessly and instantaneously through their communion with God, while animals, possessing only natural instinct, require no form of rational expression (see DVE I, ii). In the De vulgari, Dante describes how the fabric of language mirrors humanity’s own twofold nature. It is ‘rationale et sensuale’ [based on reason and the senses] (DVE I, iii, 2), an entity that reflects man’s standing as a being bestowed with intellect but weighed down by the mortal flesh. Unlike animals, humans may communicate an interior consciousness, and yet they must do so corporeally and via the arbitrary and mutable linguistic sign. To speak of ‘language’ for Dante is really to speak of two linguistic systems: ‘grammar’ (any lingua regulata, but especially Latin) and the ‘natural’ vernacular.106 These differ, first, in their respective fixity and mutability. Dante saw Latin as artificial, ‘man-made’ language. It was this quality that rendered it, as noted above, the ideal language of institutions and texts whose remits extended across diverse peoples and territories. In its strict imposition of linguistic norms, grammar seeks to safeguard language from distortions across space and time. The vernacular, lacking these artificial regulations, is inherently mutable and lacks the stability as well as the cultural heritage of Latin, as Dante notes in the Convivio.107 106

For a helpful overview of Latin and the vernacular in Dante, see C. Grayson, ‘Nobilior est vulgaris: Latin and Vernacular in Dante’s Thought’, in Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 54–76. Bibliography on Dante and language is, of course, vast. See for example E. Auerbach, ‘Sermo humilis’, in Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. by R. Manheim (London: Routledge, 1965), pp. 25–66; Z. G. Barański, ‘I trionfi del volgare’, in ‘Sole nuovo, luce nuova’: Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996), pp. 41–77, and ‘Dante’s Biblical Linguistics’, Lectura Dantis, 5 (1989), 105–43; Fortuna et al., eds, Dante’s Plurilingualism; Lombardi, Syntax, pp. 121–74; Marchesi; P. V. Mengaldo, Linguistica e retorica di Dante (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1978), pp. 60–76; M. Shapiro, ‘De vulgari eloquentia’: Dante’s Book of Exile (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). 107 ‘Lo latino è perpetuo e non corruttibile, e lo volgare è non stabile e corruttibile. Onde vedemo nelle scritture antiche delle comedie e tragedie latine, che non si possono transmutare, quello medesimo che oggi avemo; che non aviene del volgare, lo quale a piacimento artificiato si trasmuta’ [Latin is eternal and incorruptible, while the vernacular is unstable and corruptible. Thus in the ancient Latin comedies and tragedies, which cannot undergo change, we find the same Latin as we have today; this is not the case with the vernacular, which, being fashioned according to one’s own preference, undergoes change] (Conv. I, v, 7–8).

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A clear hierarchy existed between the two forms of language. Latin, as we have seen, was the bedrock of the medieval education system and strongly associated with cultural authority, and for as long as one remained restricted to the mother tongue, one remained excluded from the world of rational, institutional discourse to which the study of ‘grammar’ provided access. This is encapsulated in the opening sentences of the De vulgari eloquentia, where Dante states that while the vernacular is the language of the domestic realm, of ‘mulieres et parvuli’ [women and children] (DVE I, i, 1), which we acquire instinctively by imitating our nurses, Latin is learned only through a lengthy course of study (see DVE I, i, 2–3). Conventionally, the vernacular was the language of the domestic, affective, and personal; Latin, the language of the public, rational, and universal. This opposition between Latin and the vernacular is carefully probed in both the Convivio and the De vulgari. Both works are evidently concerned with raising the cultural stock of the ‘volgare’: the Convivio seeks to impart scholastic philosophy (indissolubly linked to ‘Latin’ culture) to a broader audience by using the mother tongue, while the De vulgari seeks to confer a dignity and fixity onto the vernacular so that it might function at a level akin to Latin. Yet while these aims are shared, the two treatises offer conflicting views on the relationship between the two forms of language. The Convivio is the more deferent of the two works towards the conventional hierarchy of Latin and vernacular. Latin, Dante declares, is the more noble, virtuous, and beautiful form of language (see Conv. I, v, 4–15). Its nobility resides in its stability, its virtue in its unique capacity to express elevated concepts, and its beauty in the fact that it is shaped not by popular usage, as is the vernacular, but by art. Dante thus makes a virtue out of Latin’s fixity, which allows it to traverse spatial and temporal borders. On account of this superiority, Dante says that he could not have written the prose of the Convivio in Latin, since it would have constituted a ‘disordinzaione’ [inappropriate relationship] (Conv. I, v, 6) if Latin commentary had ‘served’ vernacular poems. Despite declaring Latin’s superiority, however, we find in Book I a number of suggestive passages that point not only to Dante’s fierce ambitions for the vernacular, but also to the profound personal importance he will come to attach to it. In the words of Cecil Grayson, the treatise shows ‘considerable emotional fervour for the vernacular and great respect for Latin’.108 Dante describes the innate love we feel towards our own idiom (‘amore a la . . . loquela propria’ [love for my native tongue]: Conv. I, xii, 1) and inveighs against those Italians who, to their shame, 108

Grayson, p. 70.

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extol other Romance languages (see Conv. I, xi). He describes, moreover, how it was the Italian vernacular that first united his parents: Questo mio volgare fu congiungitore de li miei generanti, che con esso parlavano, sì come ’l fuoco è disponitore del ferro al fabbro che fa lo coltello; per che manifesto è lui essere concorso a la mia generazione, e così essere alcuna cagione del mio essere. (Conv. I, xiii, 4) [This vernacular of mine, being the language in which my parents spoke, brought them together, functioning like the fire that prepares the iron for the smith to make a knife. It is clear, then, that it helped to bring about my birth, and was, therefore, to an extent the source of my being.]

The vernacular is here located at the core of Dante’s identity and serves as a conduit of desire. In the words of Gary Cestaro, the author ‘locates the mother tongue at the very origin of his being, the Aristotelian efficient cause that brought his parents together in sexual union to effect his generation’.109 In the same chapter, Dante describes how the vernacular led him to Latin and higher learning (Conv. I, xiii, 5), challenging that opposition between grammar and the vernacular at the heart of medieval culture and establishing greater fluidity between them.110 Dante famously ends Book I by forecasting a linguistic revolution, describing how the ‘sole nuovo’ [new sun] of the vernacular will soon triumph over the ‘usato sole’ [old sun] of Latin (Conv. I, xiii, 12). The passages cited above highlight two separate and at times competing facets of Dante’s commitment to the vernacular. In suggesting that the vernacular led him to higher learning, and in predicting the triumph of the ‘sole nuovo’, as well as the very fact of writing a text like the Convivio in the vernacular, Dante is challenging the monopoly of Latin and attempting to appropriate a new cultural capital for the mother tongue. However, in describing the innate love for his own vernacular and its role in channelling the love of his parents, he hints at the vernacular’s intimate association with selfhood and desire—an association that will prove crucial to his poetics. Dante’s use of the vernacular throughout his career continually attends to each of these aspects: on the one hand, his desire to confer cultural authority onto his mother tongue, which requires an adoption of the modalities of Latin discourse in his vernacular writing; on the other, his conviction that the vernacular was, quite unlike Latin, a form of language imbued with desire—a conviction that informs his loyalty to love as a privileged vernacular materia. He does not simply wish to transpose the vernacular into the context of Latin discourse; rather, he remains cognizant of its very particular qualities. For all its 109

Cestaro, p. 64.

110

See Cestaro, p. 65.

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acknowledgement of the subjective properties of the vernacular, however, the Convivio itself, as we saw in the previous section, increasingly reinforces an opposition between authority and subjectivity. While its opening chapters reverberate with Dante’s deeply individuated sense of post-exilic injustice, its later pages often read like a Latin commentary that happens to be written in the vernacular, privileging abstract truths and theories over the subjectivity and desire identified as the hallmarks of a vernacular lyric textuality. Where the Convivio, for all its celebration of the vernacular, had endorsed the conventional hierarchy between Latin and the vernacular, the De vulgari declares the vernacular to be the more ‘noble’ form of language, in what Steven Botterill terms a ‘moment of extraordinary significance in Italian, indeed Western, cultural history’:111 Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata; tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis, cum illa potius artificialis existat. (DVE I, i, 4) [Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.]

The parameters of linguistic ‘nobility’ have shifted. While Dante would doubtless maintain that Latin’s stability renders it the ideal form of language for institutional discourse, he detects a unique quality in the vernacular, which he celebrates on account of its ‘naturalness’. By ‘natural’, Dante means language shaped by history, practice, and circumstance within God’s creation, and he uses the first book of the linguistic treatise to situate the vernacular in salvation history.112 This said, the De vulgari as a whole, in seeking a more stable ‘illustrious’ vernacular, attempts to impose an ‘unnatural’ grammatical fixity onto the mother tongue. Once again we see Dante’s linguistic thought characterized by tension. In situating his linguistic thought in a wider metaphysical framework, Dante was influenced by the theologized linguistic theory of Augustine.113 111 S. Botterill, in Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by S. Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xviii. 112 Lombardi states that ‘no [medieval] theory of language could be supported without its metaphysical counterpart’ (Syntax, p. 4). See also Barański, ‘Dante’s Biblical Linguistics’, pp. 107–12. 113 On Augustine and language, see for example C. Ando, ‘Augustine on Language’, Revue des études augustiniennes, 40 (1994), 45–78; Cestaro, pp. 15–20; Lombardi, Syntax,

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Augustine denied that language had existed in Eden, claiming that communication there had taken place without recourse to words.114 Language was thus indelibly linked to the Fall, and constituted a fundamental part of man’s postlapsarian condition. Like modern semioticians, Augustine regarded words as arbitrary signs, a fallen substitute for the divine Word. If properly inspired by love, however, the individual could use these limited and fragmentary signs in the search for divine truth.115 Language therefore possessed an ambivalent status. While fundamentally limited, and concomitant with what Augustine terms the ‘region of unlikeness’, words, interlaced with love, could also help to overcome the distance between humankind and God.116 Like desire, with which it enjoys a synergetic relationship, language is living proof of man’s separation from God while serving as a means by which that separation might be overcome. A similar ambivalence is felt in Dante’s reflection on language. Unlike Augustine, Dante claims in the De vulgari (but not in the later Commedia) that Adam possessed a stable and fully formed language – what we now call Hebrew (DVE I, v). Dante privileges the vernacular in part because he regards it, unlike grammar, as the ‘natural’ heir to this pristine Edenic idiom.117 This is not to say, however, that the modern vernacular is the same as Adam’s language, for the essence of language in fact changed irrevocably with the Fall. Dante tells us that prior to the original sin Adam spoke joyously, and only of God, while following his expulsion speech became a form of lament: Quid autem prius vox primi loquentis sonaverit, viro sane mentis in promptu esse non titubo ipsum fuisse quod ‘Deus’ est, scilicet El, vel per modum interrogationis vel per modum responsionis. Absurdum atque rationi videtur orrificum ante Deum ab homine quicquam nominatum fuisse, cum ab ipso et pp. 22–76; Marchesi; S. Vecchio, Le parole come segni: Introduzione alla linguistica agostiniana (Palermo: Novecento, 1994). 114 115 See Lombardi, Syntax, p. 29. See Lombardi, Syntax, pp. 22–76. 116 See M. W. Ferguson, ‘Saint Augustine’s Region of Unlikeness: The Crossing of Exile and Language’, The Georgia Review, 29, no. 4 (Winter 1975), 842–65. For the ‘region of unlikeness’ in Augustine, see Confessions 7, 10. On the concept in relation to Dante, see J. Freccero, ‘The Prologue Scene’, in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. by R. Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 1–28; G. Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 151–2. 117 As is well known, Dante adjusts his stance in Paradiso XXVI, where Adam tells Dante that the language we spoke prior to the Fall was a mutable vernacular language akin to all others, extinct before the Tower of Babel was constructed, thereby further legitimizing Dante’s use of the ‘volgare’ in his ‘sacred’ poem; see Contini, ‘Dante come personaggiopoeta’, p. 42; K. Brownlee, ‘Language and Desire in Paradiso XXVI’, Lectura Dantis, 6 (1990), 45–59.

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in ipsum factus fuisset homo. Nam sicut post prevaricationem humani generis quilibet exordium sue locutionis incipit ab ‘heu’, rationabile est quod ante qui fuit inciperet a gaudio; et cum nullum gaudium sit extra Deum, sed totum in Deo, et ipse Deus totus sit gaudium, consequens est quod primus loquens primo et ante omnia dixisset ‘Deus’. (DVE I, iv, 4) [As to what was first pronounced by the voice of the first speaker, that will readily be apparent to anyone in their right mind, and I have no doubt that it was the name of God or El, in the form either of a question or of an answer. It is manifestly absurd, and an offence against reason, to think that anything should have been named by a human being before God, when he had been made human by Him and for Him. For if, since the disaster that befell the human race, the speech of every one of us has begun with ‘woe!’, it is reasonable that he who existed before should have begun with a cry of joy; and, since there is no joy outside God, but all joy is in God and since God Himself is joy itself, it follows that the first man to speak should first and before all have said ‘God’.]

While the first human word was uttered in joy and was a testament to prelapsarian plenitude, with the advent of sin language became an expression of man’s innate lack and longing to return to God.118 The ‘heu’ uttered by every human at birth reflects this painful condition of exile and estrangement. Language, by now imbued with postlapsarian desire, would suffer a further and more decisive blow with the episode of Babel (see DVE I, vii), when the language of Adam and his ancestors was shattered into the myriad vernaculars of today. Only those few who disdained the hubristic endeavour retained Adam’s Hebrew tongue. It is the fragmentation and instability derived from Babel that ‘grammar’ attempts to combat, imposing an ‘unnatural’ fixity. The vernacular’s mutability, by contrast, attests to the spiritual vicissitudes of mankind: it bears the scars of man’s linguistic Fall, reflecting the nature of humanity’s postlapsarian relationship to God. Michelangelo Picone has shown how the relationship between vernacular language, desire, and spiritual pilgrimage is implicitly probed later in Book 1, as Dante explains the relationship between different Romance languages: Totum vero quod in Europa restat ab istis, tertium tenuit ydioma, licet nunc tripharium videatur: nam alii oc, alii oïl, alii sì affirmando locuntur, ut puta Yspani, Franci et Latini. Signum autem quod ab uno eodemque ydiomate istarum trium gentium progrediantur vulgaria, in promptu est, quia multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut ‘Deum’, ‘celum’, ‘amorem’, ‘mare’, ‘terram’, ‘est’, ‘vivit’, ‘moritur’, ‘amat’, alia fere omnia. (DVE I, viii, 6) 118

See Picone, ‘Lingua e poesia’, in ‘Vita nuova’ e tradizione romanza, pp. 1–26 (p. 6).

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[All the rest of Europe that was not dominated by these two vernaculars was held by a third, although nowadays this itself seems to be divided in three: for some now say ‘oc’, some ‘oïl’, and some ‘sì’, when they answer in the affirmative; and these are the Hispanic, the French, and the Italians. Yet the sign that the vernaculars of these three peoples derive from one and the same language is plainly apparent: for they can be seen to use the same words to signify many things, such as ‘God’, ‘heaven’, ‘love’, ‘sea’, ‘earth’, ‘is’, ‘lives’, ‘dies’, ‘loves’, and almost all others.]

As Dante sets out several words shared by the different vernaculars, Picone shows that each of them is drawn from the semantic field of Christian pilgrimage: they denote the destination (‘Deum’, ‘celum’), the wilderness (‘mare’, ‘terram’), and especially the path of love (‘amorem’, ‘amat’) along which we travel from one to the other during our lives (‘est’, ‘vivit’, ‘moritur’).119 These words that define our pilgrimage of desire also define our status as users of vernacular language. It is telling that Dante states that while poets in the three Romance languages agree on a number of words, they do so especially on the word ‘love’, reinforcing the link between vernacularity and ‘Amor’ that I see as so important in Dante’s work: ‘Trilingues ergo doctores in multis conveniunt, et maxime in hoc vocabulo quod est Amor’ [Learned writers in all three vernaculars agree, then, on many words, and especially upon the word ‘love’] (DVE I, ix, 3). Vernacular language, as natural language, is grounded in and entwined with love—the force through which humanity’s relationship with God may be reconstituted.120 We see in the De vulgari how vernacular language enjoys a close relationship with postlapsarian desire. It is also defined, again unlike Latin, by its connection to a specifically embodied notion of selfhood, as explored especially by Gary Cestaro—a connection that is important in accounting for Dante’s enduring erotic commitment. Cestaro’s work is inspired by Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical work on language and the formation of subjectivity, which he believes resonates in Dante’s reflection on ‘grammar’ and the vernacular.121 Kristeva detects in the infant’s act of suckling a pre-linguistic, corporeal form of signification, triggered by desire for the mother’s breast. She calls this signification Chora, or the ‘semiotic’. It is through this phase, ‘where the subject enacts in intimate corporeal terms the processes of absorption and repulsion, displacement and condensation eventually needed for language acquisition’, that selfhood begins to emerge.122 The corporeal instinct of the ‘semiotic’ is later 119

120 Picone, ‘Lingua e poesia’, p. 6. See Picone, ‘Lingua e poesia’, p. 16. See J. Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). 122 Cestaro, p. 3. 121

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repressed, however, by the dualistic ‘symbolic’ order of adult language. Kristeva argues that this elemental, corporeal dimension can be reactivated through ‘poetic language’, which, in its foregrounding of the signifier, can overcome the inherent duality and arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and allows the ‘semiotic’ to re-emerge. Cestaro shows that this paradigm is highly pertinent to the linguistic thought of the Middle Ages, and to Dante in particular. While in medieval culture the vernacular was widely depicted through the image of the nursing body, ‘grammar’ was depicted as a whip-wielding wet-nurse, weaning the child from its mother’s milk/tongue while imposing a new grammatical order. Threatened by the vernacular’s instability and association with maternal affectivity, ‘grammar’ was used to draw a line between reason and desire, body and intellect, which in the vernacular enjoyed a unique fluidity. Cestaro has shown how Dante’s own use of suckling imagery relates to his evolving attitude towards the mother tongue. First, he highlights the tension between ‘grammar’ and the vernacular in the unfinished Convivio and De vulgari.123 While both works promote the vernacular, they similarly regard the espousal of ‘grammar’ as a necessary stage in the journey to adulthood. This model of socio-linguistic development is encapsulated in Convivio IV: ‘Onde sì come nato, tosto lo figlio a la tetta de la madre s’apprende, così tosto come alcuno lume d’animo in esso appare, si dee volgere a la correzione del padre, e lo pardre lui ammaestrare’ [So as a child clings to the mother’s breast as soon as it is born, likewise as soon as some light appears in his mind he ought to turn to the correction of his father, and his father should give him instruction]: Conv. IV, xxiv, 14. The De vulgari, meanwhile, though it celebrates the vernacular on account of its ‘naturalness’, seeks to regulate it—‘Latinize’ it—and thus sever it from its corporeal roots in the search for an illustrious vernacular. According to Cestaro, this intimate relationship between the vernacular and corporeal desire proves the De vulgari’s undoing.124 He sees the treatise as acting out a constant tension between Dante the grammarian, who seeks to standardize the vernacular, and Dante the poet, who recognizes and rejoices in 123 The De vulgari, says Cestaro, ‘oscillates between the grammarian and poet, rational idealist and skeptical empiricist. The De vulgari’s insistent, if oblique, references to the primal scene of suckling in the nurse’s body succeed, ultimately, in undermining the grammarian’s project and bringing it to an untimely end’ (p. 68). 124 ‘For all that [Dante] would claim rational manhood for his vernacular text, he is drawn to the site of original desire in the mother tongue’: Cestaro, p. 64. On tensions between the De vulgari and Commedia, see also Barański, ‘I trionfi del volgare’; C. Honess, ‘Salus, venus, virtus: Poetry, Politics, and Ethics from the De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia’, The Italianist, 27 (2007), 185–205; Mengaldo, Linguistica.

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its natural instability.125 It is ultimately the poet (and the fluid, corporeal mother tongue) who prevails, for the Commedia reverses the paradigm endorsed by the two treatises, whereby the subject learns ‘grammar’ in order to be ‘weaned’ from the maternal vernacular and assume his place in the patriarchal social order. The Paradiso, by contrast, is filled with images of suckling, as Dante ‘appropriates and redeems the very site of physical, linguistic, and subjective instability that horrified classical grammar [so that] the nurse’s body becomes the emblem of a primal and eternal truth’.126 Thus, Cestaro argues, the Paradiso creates a new form of Christian subjectivity, a ‘redeemed corporeal selfhood’, which is constructed in the Earthly Paradise.127 This selfhood does not entail a rejection of corporeality in favour of reason, but harmonizes the two aspects.128 The assumption of this selfhood is marked by the succession of Dante’s guides: the rational (classical) Virgil is replaced by (or rather reconciled with) the affective (vernacular, lyric) figure of Beatrice.129 Dante’s re-espousal of the nursing body, and the vernacular association with corporeality, corresponds to the Commedia’s embodied notion of selfhood (to which I shall return in Chapter 2)130 and its ‘plurilingual’ poetics, which recant the ‘grammatical’ regulation imposed on the vernacular in the De vulgari. As Barański, in particular, has illustrated, the ‘comic’ style of Dante’s masterpiece attempts to overcome the restrictions of conventional medieval stili in order to imitate the full spectrum of creation.131 Unlike the ‘volgare illustre’ of the De vulgari or the more rarefied lyric register of the Vita nova, the elastic, fluid, and corporeal vernacular of the Commedia allows Dante to relate the nature of his journey with greater veracity and vitality, beholden not to arbitrary stylistic rules but to the reality experienced in all its breadth and diversity. My focus will return to the Commedia in detail shortly, but first I wish to pause to relate this wider reflection on Dante’s linguistic thought to the previous two sections and to the chapter’s broader argument, for I regard 125

126 127 See Cestaro, pp. 49–76. Cestaro, p. 8. Cestaro, p. 113. See S. Fortuna and M. Gragnolati, ‘ “Attaccando al suo capezzolo le mie labbra ingorde”: corpo, linguaggio e soggetività da Dante ad Aracoeli di Elsa Morante’, Nuova corrente, 55 (2008), 85–123 (p. 89). 129 Schnapp argues that the Commedia’s ‘sexual solecisms’ (its occasional feminizing of Virgil and masculinizing of Beatrice) serve to redefine the entrenched opposition between the ‘feminine’ vernacular lyric and the ‘masculine’ Latin epic, creating a hybrid, Christian ‘genre’ sui generis. 130 See especially M. Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Body and Soul in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 131 See various essays by Barański, especially ‘I trionfi del volgare’; Auerbach, ‘Sermo humilis’ and ‘Farinata and Cavalcante’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 174–202; Fortuna et al., eds, Dante’s Plurilingualism. 128

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the connection as crucial. While the poet’s commitment to love poetry in the Vita nova appears to be founded merely upon the conventions established by previous vernacular poets, the association between vernacular language, love, and subjectivity becomes in time a more carefully theorized cornerstone of Dante’s poetics. Ultimately, his loyalty to his Florentine vernacular is not motivated merely by convention, linguistic patriotism, or a desire for vulgarization. Rather, he believes that vernacular language possesses a vitality that eludes Latin.132 While lacking the latter’s stability and cultural status, it possesses a powerful identification with the subject and the embodied pilgrimage of desire it undertakes. Like desire, it is at once a marker of exile from God’s kingdom and a means by which that relationship might be reconstructed, a form of language more unstable than Latin and yet more primal and illuminating with respect to the individual and his spiritual condition. Dante’s understanding of the vernacular is of paramount importance for our own understanding of his improbable erotic commitment. If poetry is to disclose the individual fully and profoundly, it must be vernacular poetry and it must be love poetry, for all vernacular words— just like all human acts and experiences—are imbued with love. Just as all earthly desire is contingent upon the soul’s separation from God, all vernacular utterance derives from the absence of the divine Word. It testifies, ultimately, to the subject’s yearning for meaning and for communion with God. For Dante, the vernacular lyric poet is one who transcribes, at once with craft and spontaneity, the very promptings of love, who succeeds in distilling in language the desiring condition of his heart. This love may, of course, take various forms and may be misdirected towards secondary goods. Nevertheless, vernacular lyric poetry bears a unique capacity, for good or for ill, to tap into this elemental dimension of the self. It constitutes a privileged form of textuality in which to revel in the vernacular’s unique properties, foregrounding the subjectivity with which ‘natural’ language enjoys a unique intimacy and opening windows onto the self and its constitutive desires. Appreciating the profound importance that Dante attaches to the vernacular, not just as a marker of civic identity and a uniquely democratic linguistic form, but as a defining aspect of our humanity, helps us to understand why his sustained pursuit of cultural authority is always 132 For Lombardi, poetry specifically has a valuable role in affording vernacular language stability ‘without annihilating [its] vitality’ (Syntax, p. 138). The binding properties of rhythm and rhyme (‘legar sé con numero e con rime’ [binding itself with number and with rhyme]: Conv. I, xiii, 6), she argues, lend corruptible vernacular language the fixity it ordinarily lacks.

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deflected by a commitment not only to his own mother tongue but also to love poetry—the textual space where the qualities of the vernacular and its relation to the desiring subject are most manifest. For Dante, vernacular love poetry is a form of writing with unique potential, in that it derives from a deep subjective truth, rather than from the distant, disembodied voices of authority. It is, as Lombardi puts it, ‘the linguistic translation of a desire’.133 His sophisticated understanding of the mother tongue, then, while seldom evoked explicitly in his engagement with other writers, is surely at stake in his own commitment to love and his insistence that other vernacular poets similarly remain inspired by it. As shall become apparent in Part II, a dualistic model of conversion, whereby the vernacular poet severs his poetry from love in order to promulgate religious instruction, betrays Dante’s view that vernacular lyric poetry, while often tending towards a perilous earthly desire, nevertheless offers the poet a valuable opportunity to create a more profound mode of writing. No longer imbued with love, vernacular words ring hollow, their full significance diluted and compromised. Dante attempts, through different strategies across different works, and with varying levels of success, to harmonize this understanding of love as a privileged, even sacrosanct, creative source of vernacular song, with the moral purpose and the apparatus of authority that would afford his writing cultural stature. His polemical erotic commitment is inseparable from this loyalty to his mother tongue. This chapter has considered the interplay between three important tensions in Dante’s minor works and surrounding culture: eros and spirituality, authority and subjectivity, and Latin and vernacular. In so doing, it has pointed to some of the important cultural and linguistic factors that motivate and underpin Dante’s commitment to the culturally and theologically compromised realm of vernacular love poetry, and the different integrative strategies we find in his minor works. Using this opening chapter as my basis and framework, I shall now consider how these same issues resonate in the Commedia, focusing in particular on how this poem of much greater cultural and theological ambition situates itself in relation to the love lyric.

133 Lombardi, Wings, p. 17. See also John Freccero: ‘The association of language and desire is at least as old as the Phaedrus . . . . The transfer of virtual image of desire from the written text to the human heart and back again is part of the history of all erotic literature, but especially Dante’s writing, where Love’s progress is identical with the movement of poetry toward the silence of the ending’: ‘Casella’s Song’, in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, pp. 186–94 (p. 193).

2 Dante’s Commedia between Dualism and Integration We saw in Chapter 1 how Dante’s vernacular poetry attempts to harmonize amatory content with a pursuit of cultural authority, all the while informed by an understanding of the mother tongue as a form of language imbued with embodied subjectivity and desire. At different moments in his early literary career, Dante adopts different strategies in formulating the kind of complex and radically integrative poetics he seeks, from the theologized eros of the Vita nova to the more subversive desires of the Rime, from the allegory and vernacular philosophizing of the Convivio to the sometimes strained linguistic theory of the De vulgari eloquentia. His tendency to harmonize different traditions, genres, and discourses is most manifest, however, in the Commedia—a work that pursues integration and syncretism still more ambitiously and audaciously. Indeed, it is a work almost obsessively synthetic in character, continually seeking to defuse tensions between aspects of medieval culture ordinarily seen to exist in conflict and opposition.1 The Commedia’s handling of desire, unquestionably one of its unifying themes, is no exception to this synthetic tendency. The poem encapsulates the all-encompassing and endlessly multifarious role of love and desire in late medieval culture, accommodating an extensive range of discourses— classical and courtly, theological and philosophical, scholastic and mystical. Love is the fulcrum of Dante’s moral universe, the seed of all virtue and all sin (Purg. XVII, 103–5). It defines the condition of the damned, the penitent, and the blessed alike.2 Desire (for Beatrice) inspires the pilgrim 1 Barański, for example, writes that ‘a key aspect of Dante’s genius was his ability to transform pre-existing cultural traditions and to synthesize different and, at times, conflicting intellectual and artistic currents into radically new and unexpected forms’: ‘Dante’s Biblical Linguistics’, p. 127. Barolini states that ‘Dante’s poetic identity is founded on [a] double-pronged need: the need to uncover aporias and dualisms and the need to reconcile them, through paradox and metaphor’: ‘Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal’, in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 1–20 (pp. 12–13). 2 As Lombardi has shown, the condition of the souls across the three realms can profitably be understood in terms of desire; whether, that is, the souls experience perpetual

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to embark upon his journey and propels him through the afterlife until, fully oriented towards God, his desire moves in perfect harmony with the love that moves the heaven and the other stars (Par. XXXIII, 142–5). It inspires the poet, whose words, he tells us, are no less than a transcription of the inner dictates of Love (Purg. XXIV, 52–4). It serves as the structuring principle of Purgatory, whose seven sins are understood as disorders of a desire that must be refined and reoriented towards God (Purg. XVII, 112–39). Love is, moreover, a unitive, cosmic force: the eternal wheeling of the heavenly spheres is a manifestation of an angelic love perpetually generated and sated. My concern in this chapter, however, is principally with the poetics of the Commedia and two interrelated questions relating to love and to poetry. First, how does this most Christian of poems—indeed, a ‘poema sacro’— situate itself in relation to the secular love lyric, and to what extent does it condemn that tradition? Second, how should we understand the Commedia in terms of the central philosophical crux associated with the love lyric of the Duecento: the ultimate compatibility or otherwise of a love for an embodied human being and a love for God? Using the prior sections as my basis, my suggestion here is that, through the figure of Beatrice, Dante ultimately seeks to generate an integrative vernacular poetics, at once eroticized and divinized, subjective and authoritative, bodily and spiritual—a poetics that does not reject the love lyric in espousing theological concerns and assuming epic dimensions, but stages a unique lyric redemption.

2.1 INFERNO: LYRIC REDEMPTION/ LYRIC PERDITI ON The Commedia immediately presents its reader with a tension surrounding the value ascribed to erotic love and love poetry, as cantos II and V of the Inferno reckon with the potentially redemptive and destructive properties of love between human beings. In Inferno II, we learn of the provenance of Dante’s journey through the afterlife. Virgil’s intercession in the ‘selva oscura’ [dark wood] (Inf. I, 2), he tells us, was orchestrated by three ladies on high: the Virgin Mary, St Lucy, and Beatrice. As has been widely noted, Virgil’s initial description of Beatrice, who ‘harrows’ Hell in the manner of Christ, recalls Dante’s poetry in the Vita nova: ‘Io era tra color che son sospesi, e donna mi chiamò beata e bella, loss (in the Inferno), temporary lack (Purgatorio), or eternal satiety (Paradiso); see Lombardi, Syntax, pp. 160–74.

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption tal che di comandare io la richiesi. Lucevan li occhi suoi più che la stella; e cominciommi a dir soave e piana, con angelica voce, in sua favella.’ (Inf. II, 52–7)

[‘I was among the ones who are suspended when a lady called me, so blessed and so fair that I implored her to command me. Her eyes shone brighter than the stars. Gentle and clear, the words she spoke to me—an angel’s voice was in her speech.’]

As in the earlier libello, the figure of Beatrice, at once ‘beata e bella’, fuses embodied human beauty and divinity while her clear speech (‘soave e piana’) ‘resembles the sublimely humble style valorized by the Comedy’,3 in contrast with Virgil’s more embellished, and later tainted, brand of eloquence (‘parola ornata’ [polished words]: Inf. II, 67).4 As noted in my Introduction, just as the pagan Virgil was seen as a personification of Reason, Dante’s early commentators immediately responded to Beatrice here as a symbol of Theology, in an attempt to affirm the orthodoxy of the poem and to demarcate potentially conflicting forms of love. However, something more complex is clearly at stake. For all that she manifests the divine and assumes a Christological function in descending into Limbo,5 Dante’s past as a young lover and love poet in Florence is unmistakably evoked, as Lucy summons Beatrice with reference to Dante as ‘quei che t’amò tanto, / ch’uscì per te de la volgare schiera’ [the one who loved you so that for your sake he left the vulgar herd] (Inf. II, 104–5).6 A unique and very particular bond between human lovers, albeit one of profound spiritual complexity, underpins and inspires this journey through the afterlife. As Beatrice puts it: ‘Amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare’ [The love that moved me makes me speak] (Inf. II, 72)—words that, moreover, 3

DDP: Robert Hollander, note to Inf. II, 56–7. On this much-discussed opposition, see E. Auerbach, ‘Sermo humilis’, pp. 65–6; R. Hollander, ‘The “Canto of the Word” (Inferno 2)’, in Lectura Dantis Newberryana, ed. by P. Cherchi and A. C. Mastrobuono, 3 vols (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), I, 95–119 (p. 107); Lombardi, Wings, pp. 23–5. On the relationship between Virgil’s ‘parola ornata’ and the ‘parole ornate’ (Inf. XVIII, 91) of Jason in the bolgia of the seducers, see Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, pp. 157–8. 5 See also Par. XXXI, 80–1: ‘che soffristi per la mia salute / in inferno lasciar le tue vestige’ [who allowed yourself, for my salvation, to leave your footprints there in Hell]. 6 The implications of the line ‘ch’uscì per te de la volgare schiera’ are somewhat contentious. Most modern commentators favour a poetic interpretation. Francesco Mazzoni, for example, suggests that it refers to Dante’s turning away from a more conventional vernacular poetry in the Vita nova to espouse a new and spiritually infused poetry (‘una matera nuova e più nobile che la passata’: VN XVII, 2). See F. Mazzoni, Saggio di un nuovo comento alla ‘Divina Commedia’ (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), pp. 289–93. ‘Volgare’ evidentally carries an association with the vernacular for Dante, while ‘schiera’ is associated with a poetic ‘school’ in Inferno IV, 101. See DDP: Robert Hollander, note to Inf. II, 105. 4

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encapsulate the connection between language and desire integral to Dante’s vernacular poetics and anticipate his famous self-definition in Purgatorio XXIV, cited at the end of this Chapter.7 Dante’s revived memory of his beloved, neglected in the years since her death, is what arouses his desire, conquers his fear, and motivates him to embark upon his voyage (‘Tu m’hai con disiderio il cor disposto / sì al venir con le parole tue, / ch’i’ son tornato nel primo proposto’ [Your words have made my heart so eager for the journey that I’ve returned to what was first proposed]: Inf. II, 136–8). While it is futile to quantify the precise extent to which this love is earthly or divine, it would seem wilfully reductive to suggest that it carries no association with the erotic, just as it would be to suggest that it carries no association with the spiritual. Canto II underlines the divine provenance of Dante’s journey but also, through Beatrice, inscribes the poem into a vernacular lyric context and stages a bold endorsement and rehabilitation of the love associated with the poetry of Dante’s youth—a love that becomes the redemptive and locomotive force underpinning this epic narration. The famous canto V, and the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, present us, by contrast, with the ‘dark side’ of erotic love and love poetry.8

7 As Lombardi notes, the love upon which Dante’s journey is founded distinguishes it from the historical and theological frameworks associated with the journeys of Aeneas and Paul, evoked earlier in the canto (‘Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono’ [I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul: line 32]). In contrast with these predecessors, ‘Dante’s moral authorization is a matter of love’: Wings, p. 23. 8 Bibliography on Inferno V is, of course, extraordinarily extensive. Studies with which I have engaged closely in preparing this study include: Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’ and ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’, also in Dante and the Origins, 304–32; A. M. Chiavacci Leonardi, ‘Introduzione al canto V’, in Dante, La Divina Commedia, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1997), I, 133–6; Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’; J. Freccero, ‘The Portrait of Francesca: Inferno V’, MLN, 124, no. 5 (Dec 2009), 7–38; R. Girard, ‘The Mimetic Desire of Paolo and Francesca’, in ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 1–8; M. Gragnolati, ‘Inferno V’, in Lectura Dantis Bononiensis, ed. by E. Pasquini (Bologna: Accademia delle Scienze, 2012), pp. 7–22; Lombardi, Wings; M. Picone, ‘Canto V’, in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. by G. Günter and M. Picone (Florence: Cesati, 1999), pp. 75–89; L. Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio: L’episodio di Francesca nella ‘Commedia’ (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007); M. Santagata, ‘Cognati e amanti: Francesca e Paolo nel V dell’Inferno’, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 48 (1997), 120–56; J. A. Scott, ‘Dante’s Francesca and the Poet’s Attitude towards Courtly Literature’, Reading Medieval Studies, V (1979), 4–20; P. Valesio, ‘Canto V: The Fierce Dove’, in Lectura Dantis: Inferno, edited by A. Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, and C. Ross (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 63–83; C. Villa, ‘Tra affetto e pietà: per Inferno V’, Lettere italiane, 51 (1999), no. 4, 513–41. I explore the canto in relation to Dante’s poetics in the Commedia in greater detail in my essay ‘Dante’s Ambivalence towards the Lustful’, in Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. by J.C. Barnes and D. O’Connell (Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming).

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As has been widely explored by modern critics, Francesca’s famous speech on love distils and exposes the signature values of several overlapping traditions of secular love literature. As well as her explicit reference to the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, which acts as ‘mediator’ between the two lovers, scholars have identified in her discourse a range of intertexts, from allusions to the Italian lyric (especially Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Guido Guinizzelli, but also Dante’s own love poetry) and Old French prose Romance to the tale of Dido and Aeneas from Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid and Capellanus’s De amore.9 These diverse elements are conflated in the words of a psychologically complex and three-dimensional character whose portrayal serves as a critique of the ideology of pre-existing love literature, and especially the vernacular love poets of Dante’s time.10 The lyric resonance of Francesca’s words is especially pronounced in her famous anaphora: ‘Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Caina attende chi a vita ci spense.’ (Inf. V, 100–8) [‘Love, quick to kindle in the gentle heart, seized this man with the fair form taken from me. The way of it afflicts me still. Love, which absolves nobody beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as you see, it has not left me yet. Love brought us to one death. Caina waits for him who quenched our lives.’]

The love described with such remarkable economy in these lines is fatalistic, violent, egotistical, physical, and ultimately deadly. It is, moreover, saturated with poetic reminiscences, most obviously the ‘stilnovist’ association of love 9 On the Italian lyric and autobiographical context, see Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’; Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’. On courtly narrative literature, see D. Maddox, ‘The Arthurian Intertexts of Inferno V’, Dante Studies, 114 (1996), 113–27; Picone, ‘Canto V’. On the medieval tradition of Dido, see Villa. Commentators habitually note the correspondence between Francesca’s ‘Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona’ and Capellanus’s ‘Amor nil posset amori denegare’ [Love can deny nothing to love] (De amore, II, 8), but it is hard to ascertain whether Dante cites Andreas specifically or evokes a lyric commonplace. Hollander, for example, cites Cino: ‘A nullo amato amar perdona amore’, while noting that we cannot establish which text predates the other: DDP: Robert Hollander, note to Inf. V, 103. 10 See Freccero, ‘The Portrait of Francesca’, on the psychological complexity and modernity of Francesca: Francesca’s speech, he writes, is ‘at once succinct and profound, a rhetorical representation in miniature of consciousness and interiority without precedent in the Middle Ages. . . . It anticipates the “subjectivity” we associate with the modern novel’ (p. 7). On Francesca’s proto-modern subjectivity see also Gragnolati, ‘Inferno V’.

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and the noble heart, that load the episode with tension: Francesca’s weakness for erotic passion and invocation of lyric poetry famously stir the pity of Dante – a man who has endured an embattled relationship with the sin of lust. He thus ends the canto fainting and falling ‘come corpo morto’ (‘sì che di pietade / io venni men così com’ io morisse. / E caddi come corpo morto cade’ [so that for pity I swooned as if in death. And down I fell as a dead body falls]: Inf. V, 140–2]). As any student of Dante knows, the modern critical interpretation of the canto hinges upon our separation of the figures of Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, which allows the potential moral ambiguity of the episode to be avoided. The poet is seen to display moral robustness in his damnation of Francesca and the lyric tradition to which her words pertain, while the errant pilgrim is seduced by her words and displays a lingering attachment to a literary ideology he must now firmly reject. John Freccero summarizes this division as follows: the moral ambiguity [of Inferno V] arises from the clash between the secular and human perspective of the damned, once shared by the pilgrim and now by most readers, and implacable Justice, which is the perspective of the poet. The compassionate pilgrim ‘narrato’ is en route to becoming the stern ‘narratore’, who, paradoxically, has been with us from the beginning.11

This untangling of ‘poet’ and ‘pilgrim’ is, of course, essential if we are to gain a suitable understanding of these two cantos. We otherwise risk making the mistake of nineteenth-century readers and romanticizing Francesca, whose moral and intellectual limitations—and, by extension, those of the lyric tradition to which her words pertain—Dante the poet unquestionably sought to underline.12 In his recent book on Inferno V, Lorenzo Renzi describes the canto as founded on Dante’s ‘condanna dell’amore terreno e della poesia d’amore’ [condemnation of earthly love and love poetry].13 He draws our attention to the fact that none of Dante’s earliest commentators detect any tension in this episode and regard Francesca as nothing more than a meretricious adulteress. In rejecting her, Renzi claims, Dante severs himself from the lyric tradition, undoing the ‘stretto binomio’ [strict binomial] of vernacular poetry and Amor dating back to the troubadours.14 He draws an 11

Freccero, ‘The Portrait of Francesca’, p. 13. On the nineteenth-century reception of Francesca, see A. McMillan, ‘Dante’s Nineteenth-century Reception: Francesca da Rimini and the Idea of Italy’, in Italy’s Three Crowns: Reading Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, ed. by Z. G. Barański and M. L. McLaughlin (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007), pp. 58–72; Renzi, pp. 129–60. 13 Renzi, p. 16. Translations are my own. 14 Renzi, p. 91. See also C. Kleinhenz, ‘Dante as Reader and Critic of Courtly Literature’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. by K. Busby and E. Kooper (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 379–93: ‘In a certain sense the courtly tradition 12

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analogy between Dante’s mode of conversion and that found in Andreas Capellanus’s bipartite De amore: ‘Nello stesso modo, Dante, scrivendo il Convivio e poi la Commedia aveva abbandonato del tutto il mondo poetico e ideologico della giovinezza. Voleva essere ormai solo poeta cristiano’ [In the same way, Dante, in writing the Convivio and then the Commedia, had altogether abandoned the poetic and ideological world of his youth. He by now only wanted to be a Christian poet].15 The language used by Freccero and Renzi posits an emphatic opposition between two Dantes: one ‘human’ and ‘secular’, aligned with earthly love and love poetry; the other ‘stern’, detached from Amor, and aligned with ‘implacable Justice’. Without dismissing the evident importance and validity of the poet/ pilgrim distinction, I would argue that this interpretative framework, if applied too starkly, can lead us to problematic conclusions. Above all, it risks oversimplifying the Commedia’s complex relationship to the love lyric by ignoring the improbable continuity between Dante the love poet and Dante the Christian auctor upon which I believe the poem itself polemically insists. We should not, in my view, regard Francesca’s damnation simply as evidence of a newfound hostility on the part of Dante towards ‘love poetry’; rather, we should view the signature ambiguity of the episode as evidence of the enormous and enduring complexity—the irreducible ambivalence—of that relationship. In beholding Francesca, we behold not simply bestial lust, but a distillation of pre-existing lyric poetry in all its moral inadequacy—but also its beauty and potency. To reduce Dante’s response to this tension, within Inferno V and within the Comedy as whole, to no more than a rigid opposition between poet and pilgrim underplays his considerable originality in this regard. In polarizing the stances of poet and pilgrim, we run the risk of making Dante into an Augustine, a Capellanus, or a Guittone in terms of his attitude towards his earthly love and love poetry, when his handling of this subject in fact emerges as crucially distinct. Suggestions that Inferno V constitutes a rejection of love poetry tout court are seemingly predicated upon the assumption that Dante’s evaluation of all his prior love poetry—from the Vita nova to the seemingly more ‘lustful’ Rime—is monolithic. Yet while the palinodic dimension of the canto must be reckoned with, a distinction needs to be drawn between different parts of Dante’s multifaceted lyric past and their relation to with its worldly seductive attractions comes to an end in Dante, who judges it to be dangerous to one’s spiritual integrity and ultimately condemns its unrepentant adherents to Hell’ (p. 385). Kleinhenz argues that the secular courtly tradition is entirely usurped by a spiritual rhetoric of courtliness. 15 Renzi, p. 90.

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Francesca’s discourse. Barolini has followed a Cavalcantian thread through the Rime, which she convincingly implicates in this canto.16 But what of the Vita nova? Claims that the libello is rejected in Inferno V are generally supported by the key line ‘Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende’ at the heart of Francesca’s anaphora, which recalls the Vita nova’s Guinizzellian sonnet, ‘Amor e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa’ [Love and the noble heart are a single thing]. There is, however, often a lack of critical precision in defining the nature of this important citation. In the hope of untangling the textual relationship between Dante and Guinizzelli in Inferno V, three questions must be asked concerning Francesca’s emphasis upon the bond between love and the noble heart: (1) Do we believe that Francesca ‘cites’ Guinizzelli, Dante, or both; (2) does this ‘citation’ mean that the work(s) in question is/are ‘damned’, or does Francesca ‘exploit’ its/their morally valid content in order to convince Dante that she is innocent; and (3) if Dante critiques his own sonnet, does this mean that the entire enterprise of the Vita nova (in addition to the ‘rime petrose’, the ‘canzone montanina’, etc.) is now relegated to the first circle of Hell? How we respond to these questions to a great extent determines how we respond to the status of ‘love poetry’ in the Commedia. My own perspective, in response to these questions, is as follows: (1) The amatory ideology encapsulated in Francesca’s quotation is quintessentially Guinizzellian. Dante himself ‘cited’ it in the Vita nova’s sonnet, drawing upon Guido as a lyric auctoritas (‘sì come il saggio pone in suo dittare’ [as the wise one says in his poem]: line 2). Moreover, as noted by Contini, the use of ‘s’apprende’ clearly evokes ‘Al cor gentil’ (‘Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende’ [Love’s fire catches in the noble heart]: line 11), but not Dante’s poem.17 (2) While Francesca’s rhetoric is no doubt self-serving, the fact that Dante wishes to call into question the moral validity of Guinizzelli’s love poetry is confirmed by the Bolognese’s presence among the lustful in Purgatorio XXVI. Let us not forget that, had he not repented, Guinizzelli would dwell alongside Francesca in the second circle of Hell on account of his love poetry. This must undermine the notion that Francesca ‘exploits’ a morally valid brand of love poetry.18 16

Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’. See Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, pp. 42–3. For an opposing view, see Santagata, who underlines what he sees as ‘la profonda dissimiglianza’ [the profound difference] (p. 130) between Francesca’s conception of love, which is purely physical, and Guido’s. He argues that what Dante critiques is not the ideology of the Romance lyric, but ‘la ricezione che certi ambienti sociali al suo tempo ne facevano’ [the way in which it was received in certain social contexts] (p. 131)—namely, the ‘falsi leggiadri’ in the earlier canzone ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ (Rime, 11). However, the fact that Guinizzelli and Arnaut are purged precisely of Francesca’s sin would seem to weaken this argument. 17 18

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(3) The poetic endpoint of the Vita nova—not an ideologically static work, but one of moral and poetic growth and transformation—is not the Guinizzellian poetics of ‘Amor e ’l cor gentil’ but the ‘intelligenza nova’ [new intelligence] (line 3) gleaned in the final sonnet, ‘Oltre la spera’ [Beyond the sphere] (VN LXI). Guinizzelli, like Guittone and Cavalcanti, is a stepping-stone in Dante’s journey to a form of lyric poetry that uniquely (if only temporarily) proves spiritually viable. Dante can, in other words, condemn parts of the Vita nova without condemning the whole. Indeed, the work itself condemns the overtly Cavalcantian path it initially follows but then abandons. We might consider, in short, that Dante ‘regrets’ his previous fawning adherence to Guinizzelli’s maxim (‘his naïve acceptance of a then current poetic cliché’, as Freccero puts it),19 without ‘regretting’ the Vita nova itself. As Barański has argued, it would be simplistic to regard the Vita nova and Commedia as ‘the two complementary panels of an ideal artistic and ideological diptych’,20 and I shall return to the limitations of the libello from the perspective of the Commedia a little later. Nevertheless, it is certainly the work in Dante’s prior oeuvre judged most favourably from the perspective of the ‘poema sacro’, and that with which Dante’s masterpiece displays most ideological affinity, on account of its theological foundations and its prefiguration of the Comedy’s fusion of eros and spirituality. It is no coincidence that in Purgatorio XXIV Dante cites the canzone ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’, the libello’s ideological centrepiece, in order to define his poetics and declare his superiority to his lyric forerunners. If Inferno V is palinodic with respect to Dante’s lyric past, I would argue that the palinode does not encompass the broader emphasis or redemptive erotics of the Vita nova. Within the opening five cantos of the Inferno, we thus bear witness to the deeply ambivalent status of vernacular love poetry—the way in which it improbably infuses the poetics of the Commedia and the way in which its more conventional ideology is acknowledged to be deeply problematic, its redemptive and corruptive potential. Canto V, as well as canto II, can itself be considered in terms of the value or, at least, the potential that Dante wishes to ascribe to love poetry, as well as his condemnation of its conventional carnal fixation. Intermediary critical stances have emerged, seeking to highlight the continuities as well as the oppositions between Francesca and Dante the poet, without denying the canto’s evident critique of secular discourses of love and 19

Freccero, ‘The Portrait of Francesca’, p. 23. Z. G. Barański, ‘The “New Life” of “Comedy”: The Commedia and the Vita Nuova’, Dante Studies, 113 (1995), 1–29 (p. 2). 20

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desire.21 Comparing Dante and Augustine, Guy Raffa states that while the latter ‘slays his former self ’, Dante ‘envisions his spiritual journey to God and new life, not through a sudden act of conversion, but by enfolding the old life within the new. . . . The poet’s way is not repudiation but revision’.22 We can, I think, productively consider Francesca in these terms. While the line between Francesca and the naïve pilgrim is evidently porous, we might consider that so too, in a different sense, is the line between Francesca and the poet of the Comedy. She both is and is not rejected: her fatalism, moral evasiveness, and disordered desire are rigorously critiqued by the author. Yet that nucleus of lyric poetry, desire, and subjectivity that we find crystallized in her discourse is not left behind, but corrected in the ‘inflamed’ poetry of desire we find in the Paradiso and, especially, in Dante’s love for Beatrice. This ‘correction’ ought to be understood less in terms of a lapidary opposition of sacred and profane loves, and more in terms of a redemption of the lyric mode, a renewal from within rather than the formulation of an antithetical mode of writing.

2.2 PURGATORIO: EARTHLY LOVES DENIGRATED AND RECUPERATED If love and desire are central concerns only occasionally in the Inferno, they are integral to the other two cantiche. Much of the Purgatorio could be seen to reinforce the notion that the Commedia seeks to denigrate all forms of earthly love and love poetry. As Barolini has shown, the Augustinian

21 Chiavacci Leonardi, in her commentary upon the canto, seeks to nuance ‘la ripetuta e variata antitesi tra il teologo che condanna e l’uomo che assolve’ [the often repeated antithesis between the theologian who condemns and the man who absolves]: ‘Introduzione al canto V’, p. 134. See also Gragnolati, ‘Inferno V’; Kay, ‘Dante’s Ambivalence towards the Lustful’; Lombardi, Wings, who argues that Dante ‘willingly leaves [the canto] ambiguous’ (p. 10). See also Barolini’s comments regarding the ambiguity of the Commedia’s so-called great sinners: ‘The many readers who have glorified Ulysses (like those who have glorified Francesca, Farinata, Brunetto, and Ugolino) were privileging a figure who is indeed privileged by the poet, not morally or eschatologically, but textually and poetically. Rather than argue against the testimony of centuries of readers who tell us that they react more passionately to this particular narrative, it seems more profitable to ask why the poet confers on some of his characters a greater textual resonance, a more inviolate ability to seduce. Dante deliberately manipulates the level of his poem’s textual tension by making it more difficult not to react affectively to some sinners than to others’: T. Barolini, ‘Dante’s Ulysses: Narrative and Transgression’, in Iannucci, ed, Dante: Contemporary Perspectives pp. 113–32 (p. 115). 22 Raffa, p. 36.

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definition of desire we find in Book IV of the Convivio is ‘virtually a blueprint’ for the philosophy of desire that underpins the second cantica.23 In cantos XVII and XVIII, Virgil teaches Dante of the integral role of desire in man’s spiritual journey, deploying a scholastic mode of argumentation and asserting the unwavering influence of free will in the realm of desire. He begins by explaining that we possess two types of love. ‘Né creator né creatura mai’ cominciò el, ‘figliuol, fu sanza amore, o naturale o d’animo; e tu ’l sai. Lo naturale è sempre stata sanza errore, ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto o per troppo o per poco di vigore.’ (Purg. XVII, 91–96) [‘Neither Creator nor His creature, my dear son, was ever without love, whether natural or of the mind’, he began, ‘and this you know. The natural is always without error, but the other may err in its chosen goal or through excessive or deficient vigour’.]

Like all created beings, we possess ‘natural’ love, oriented towards our Creator, meaning that we can wish no ill towards God nor towards ourselves. As creatures bestowed with intellect, however, we also possess a second form of love, subjected to our unique gift of reason. Unlike the first, this second kind of love can err, both in its chosen object or its degree. Our moral condition and our eternal destiny are ultimately determined by the manner in which we deploy this ‘elective’ love (‘Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser convene / amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute / e d’ogne operazion che merta pene’ [From this you surely understand that love must be the seed in you of every virtue and every deed that merits punishment]: Purg. XVII, 103–105); whether, that is, we direct it towards God or else towards secondary objects and goals. Virgil goes on to categorize the sins of the second realm according to whether souls have loved inadequately (in the case of sloth), aberrantly (pride, envy, and wrath), or have loved secondary goods to an excessive degree (avarice, gluttony, and lust). Desire, Virgil exclaims in canto XVIII, is ‘moto spiritale’ [movement of the spirit] (line 32), the force that leads us to our Maker and prevents the soul from resting until it is fulfilled (‘l’animo preso entra in disire / . . . e mai non posa / fin che la cosa amata fa gioire’

23 Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 100. She continues: ‘[the] “plot” [of the Purgatorio] hinges on an Augustinian view of temporal goods as inherently dissatisfying because of their mortality, as necessarily dissatisfying even when they are (in Augustine’s words) “things perfectly legitimate in themselves, which cannot be relinquished without regret” ’ (p. 102). On the presence of Augustine in Virgil’s discourse, see Hawkins, ‘Divide and Conquer’.

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[the mind, thus seized, achieves desire . . . never resting as long as it enjoys the thing it loves]: Purg. XVIII, 31–3).24 The Purgatorio constitutes, in the words of Pertile, ‘un processo di rieducazione e conversione del desiderio terrestre in desiderio celeste’ [a process of rehabilitation and conversion of earthly into spiritual desire].25 Like the Convivio, to whose meditation on desire it is indebted, it can be considered essentially dualistic in its handling of the relationship of these two forms of love. Worldly desires and attachments are continually cast as problematic and in need of rejection and reorientation. An emphasis is immediately placed upon the need to transcend affective bonds in the encounter between Dante and Casella in Purgatorio II. Their meeting seemingly constitutes a palinodic episode with respect to the Convivio, as Cato rebukes the ‘spiriti lenti’ [laggard spirits] (120) for their rapt absorption in Casella’s singing of Dante’s secular canzone ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ (line 112), placed in opposition to the sacred Psalm ‘In exitu Israël de Aegypto’ (line 46).26 Furthermore, the failed embrace between the two friends, like Cato’s striking lack of interest in the fate of his wife Marcia in Purgatorio I (76–93), serves to highlight how worldly attachments and friendships and an embodied, relational sense of identity must be reconsidered and left behind in this new realm.27 Dante’s dream of the siren in canto XIX, too, serves as an emblematic meditation on the nature of corrupted earthly desire. Under Dante’s gaze, the grotesque, ailing physiognomy of this figure becomes beautiful and enchanting, her stammering voice a sweet song that seduces Dante before an unidentified ‘donna . . . santa e presta’ [a lady holy and alert] (line 26) exposes the siren’s foul stench. The siren is a personification of those ‘presenti cose, / col falso lor piacer’ [things set in front of us, with their false delights] (Purg. XXXI, 34–5) whose tyranny is purged on the final three terraces of Mount Purgatory. Her metamorphosis serves to elucidate the true nature of immoderate worldly desires: the immediate gratification that can be gained from ‘presenti cose’ blinds us to their worthlessness— their ‘ugliness’—from an eternal perspective. Intellectual cupidity is implicated here, for, as noted by several scholars, Dante’s siren may be read in 24 The ‘fin che’ here can be read as ‘until’ or ‘as long as’. On the context and implications of these alternative readings, see Lombardi, Wings, pp. 110–31. 25 Pertile, ‘Semantica’, p. 37. See also ‘Lo scoglio e la vesta’, in La punta del disio, pp. 59–83. 26 See, for example, Freccero, ‘Casella’s Song’; R. Hollander, ‘Purgatorio II: Cato’s Rebuke and Dante’s scoglio’, Italica, 52 (1975), 348–63. 27 See M. Gragnolati, ‘Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection and Identity in the Commedia’, in Dante and the Human Body: Eight Essays, ed. by J. C. Barnes and J. Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 117–37. Gragnolati ultimately stresses that the lack felt by the souls shows the enduring importance of a corporeal sense of identity in the poem.

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light of Cicero’s De finibus as the curiositas that led Ulysses astray (‘Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago / al canto mio’ [I drew Ulysses, eager for the journey, with my song]: XIX, 22).28 But most explicitly at stake is carnal fixation and the warping of perception that arises from the lover’s obsessive gaze.29 The distorted features of the siren, indices of her mortality, are transformed by his ‘sguardo’ into something beautiful and desirable. The dream of the siren thus foregrounds the self-deception inherent in the experience of worldly, and especially carnal, appetite; as Kenelm Foster puts it, the ‘delusion involved in that “twisted love”, amor torto, which in the canto on charity, Paradiso XXVI, will be directly contrasted with amor diritto, “straight love”’.30 The passage would seem to condemn in exemplary fashion the notion associated with some lyric poets, including Dante, that a mortal lady might act as a vehicle of transcendence.31 The structuring principles of the Purgatorio and some of its key episodes thus seem at odds with the notion I am considering here of a redemption of vernacular love poetry. Its overarching philosophy with regard to desire seems in tune more with the orthodox and obdurate paradigm of the Convivio than the redeemed eros of the Vita nova, and with a reading of Dante as ultimately dualistic in his relationship to earthly love and love poetry. Yet while the Convivio, in opposing eros and reason, passion and virtue, could not absorb the redeemed eros of the Vita nova, the Commedia endeavours to harmonize these two, formerly competing philosophies, somewhat paradoxically retaining a strong erotic and affective charge and lyric dimension while endorsing this Augustinian framework of desire. Purgatorio XXVI, a canto to which I will have cause to return in detail at various stages in the second part of this book, encapsulates the tension in the Commedia between Dante’s privileging of erotic poetry and its condemnation. The love poets Dante encounters here, Guido Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel, repent for their poetic articulation of lust, and their commitment to amatory song is recanted and transposed into a pious form 28 See E. Moore, Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 264–6; J. A. Mazzeo, ‘The “Sirens” of Purgatorio XXXI, 45’, Studies in Philology, 55 (1958), 457–63. Dante’s siren also draws upon Boethius’s sirens of poetry. See G. Mezzadroli, ‘Dante, Boezio e le sirene’, Lingua e stile, 25 (1990), 25–56. 29 On the siren and the role of vision in corrupting the power of judgement in courtly poetry, see O. Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the ‘Divine Comedy’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 59–60, who also links the episode to other medieval discourses on ‘lovesickness’ (see especially pp. 65–7). 30 K. Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1977), p. 52. 31 In my essay ‘Dante’s Cavalcantian Relapse’ I read the siren episode in light of Dante’s lyrics for the ‘pargoletta’, which, I argue, similarly stage a failed attempt to achieve transcendence through a mortal object of desire.

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of prayer. At the same time, however, they are praised on account of their literary value—Guido identified as a poetic father to Dante (‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior’ [a father to me and to others, my betters]: 97–8), Arnaut as a master craftsman (‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ [the finest craftsman of the mother tongue]: 117). As we shall see in more detail later, the two poets’ erstwhile commitment to Amor in fact seems to account for this privileged poetic status, even as it accounts for their presence in this part of Purgatory, as Dante promotes their erotic verse at the expense of the decisively non-erotic poetics of Guittone and his perceived Occitan counterpart Giraut de Bornelh (lines 118–26).32 Leaving the terrace of the lustful, too, both the peril and the redemptive quality of Dante’s desire for Beatrice are acknowledged. In what is no doubt a further acknowledgement of Dante’s complex relationship with lust, he is filled with fear and trepidation before crossing the ‘foco che li affina’ [the fire that refines them] (XXVI, 148) that separates him from the Earthly Paradise. Virgil’s words of encouragement and appeals to intellect fail to persuade Dante to continue, until a mention of Beatrice stirs in him a desire to proceed: Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro, turbato un poco disse: ‘Or vedi, figlio: tra Bëatrice e te è questo muro.’ Come al nome di Tisbe aperse il ciglio Piramo in su la morte, e riguardolla, allor che ’l gelso diventò vermiglio; così, la mia durezza fatta solla, mi volsi al savio duca, udendo il nome che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla. (Purg. XXVII, 34–42) [When he saw me stay, unmoved and obstinate, he said, somewhat disturbed: ‘Now look, my son, this wall stands between Beatrice and you.’ As at the name of Thisbe, though on the point of death, Pyramus raised his lids and gazed at her, that time the mulberry turned red, just so, my stubbornness made pliant, I turned to my wise leader when I heard the name that ever blossoms in my mind.]

Not for the last time in the poem, Dante makes contrastive use of a classical exemplar of tragic erotic passion, in this case Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, in formulating a simile to describe his own ‘comic’ love for Beatrice.33 As Moevs summarizes: ‘If the heroic sensual love of Pyramus 32 Giunta describes Purgatorio XXVI as ‘una poderosa legittimazione della poesia d’amore laica’ [a powerful legitimization of secular love poetry], as Dante ‘ritorna alle sorgenti della poetica stilnovistica’ [returns to the wellsprings of the stilnovo]: Giunta, La poesia italiana, p. 57. See also my essay ‘Dante’s Ambivalence towards the Lustful’. 33 For an excellent exposition of the allusion, see Moevs, Metaphysics, pp. 90–102.

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and Thisbe, of Dido, and of Francesca leads to death and constitutes tragedy, then eros metamorphosed into the love named Beatrice, the love that is Christian revelation and that leads to union and to life out of time, is comedy, the style of Dante’s poem and of the Bible.’34 What is intriguing about this instance, in addition to the rich and dynamic interplay with the classical source, is that while Arnaut and Guinizzelli are seen to distance themselves sharply from their erotic pasts in reconciling themselves to God, it is Dante’s desire for Beatrice that becomes his source of elevation, his means of transcending and not succumbing to lust. While his precursors’ identities as love poets were in the previous canto forsaken, it is by contrast the name of Dante’s poetic muse, Beatrice in all her singularity, that spurs him onwards. In short, the relationship between Dante and both the classical lovers and the vernacular poets is not a binary opposition. Dante’s love preserves an aspect of that passion as well as transforming it. His eros is, crucially and distinctively, ‘metamorphosed’ and not relinquished. The tensions associated with desire in the Purgatory, between what we might term Augustinian dualism and Dantean integration, are perhaps most manifest in the Earthly Paradise, as Dante re-encounters Beatrice.35 On the one hand, the rebukes and accusations articulated by Beatrice in cantos XXX–XXXI together reinforce the cantica’s wider Augustinian emphasis on rejecting earthly desires and attachments and an exclusive identification with the mortal body:36 ‘Sì tosto come in su la soglia fui di mia seconda etade e mutai vita, questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui. Quando di carne a spirto era salita, e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era, fu’io a lui men cara e men gradita; e volse i passi suoi per via non vera, imagini di ben seguendo false, che nulla promession rendono intera.’ (Purg. XXX, 124–32)

34

Moevs, Metaphysics, p. 95. Space does not allow me to consider in detail the enigmatic (and notably ‘lyric’) figure of Matelda in Purgatorio XXVIII, taken by most critics as an unfallen Eve who welcomes Dante to Eden, and a prefiguration of Beatrice. Dante’s apparently carnal desire for her, which seems to indicate his own lack of Edenic purity, is suggested through his evocation of Cavalcanti’s erotic pastorella ‘In un boschetto’ as well as of the pagan goddesses Proserpina and Venus. On the vernacular sources in this episode, see especially Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, pp. 68–98. For an overview of Matelda and different schools of interpretation of her identity and significance, with bibliography, see C. Cioffi, ‘Matelda’, in DE, pp. 599–602. 36 On the Augustinian flavour of Beatrice’s words, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 102. 35

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[‘Once I had reached the threshold of my second age, when I changed lives, he took himself from me and gave himself to others. When I had risen to spirit from my flesh, as beauty and virtue in me became more rich, to him I was less dear and less than pleasing. He set his steps upon an untrue way, pursuing those false images of good that bring no promise to fulfilment.’]

These lines pit flesh and spirit against one another, powerfully denigrating the former while valorizing the latter. Beatrice’s death ought to have revealed to Dante the transience of all earthly pleasures, their inability to provide enduring quiescence (‘che nulla promession rendono intera’). It should have led him to contemplate the divine and eternal grounding of his being, to recognize that far from being diminished or eradicated her beauty in Paradise would far surpass its carnal counterpart. In short, her death ought to have heralded a ‘levar suso’ [rising up] (Purg. XXXI, 56): an orientation of Dante’s desire towards God. Yet instead he was newly seduced by those false images of good, embodied by the siren in canto XIX, that merely generated further desire. In this sense, the encounter with Beatrice corresponds with the prospective emphasis of the cantica, which highlights the importance of overcoming temporal attachments and fixating upon the eternal destination, not revelling in earthly affections but continuing the spiritual journey. And yet, on the other hand, the reappearance of Beatrice also stages a powerful resumption of Dante’s erotic and affective history—the scene is characterized by a retrospective as well as a prospective thrust. As shown by the biblical citations that frame her arrival, Beatrice comes as Christ,37 reflecting her salvific function in his own spiritual life, but equally she returns as Dante’s secular beloved, with great emphasis placed upon her embodied form, and she wears a red dress (‘vestita di color di fiamma viva’ [dressed in the colour of living flame]: XXX, 33) as she had when Dante first saw her on the streets of Florence.38 The pilgrim’s response to her is intensely visceral and evokes the erotic passion of his boyhood: E lo spirito mio, che già cotanto tempo era stato ch’a la sua presenza non era di stupor, tremando, affranto, sanza de li occhi aver più conoscenza, per occulta virtù che da lei mosse, d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza. 37 Most strikingly ‘Benedictus qui venis!’ (Purg. XXX, 19), taken from Mark’s Gospel (11:9–10), even preserves the masculine ending of ‘Benedictus’. 38 See VN II, 3. On Beatrice’s strongly embodied return, Holmes states ‘While Beatrice represents the spiritual rather than the material her descent to Dante in Purgatory is, like the incarnate Jesus, embodied, complicating the poet’s use of the flesh/spirit dialectic’ (Dante’s Two Beloveds, p. 196).

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[And in my spirit, which for so long a time had not been overcome with awe that used to make me tremble in her presence—even though I could not see her with my eyes—through the hidden force that came from her I felt the overwhelming power of that ancient love. As soon as that majestic force, which had once pierced me before I had outgrown my childhood, struck my eyes, I turned to my left with the confidence a child has running to his mamma when he is afraid or in distress.]

These lines, as noted by numerous commentators, recall Dante’s turbulent reaction to the sight of Beatrice in the early stages of the Vita nova (‘mi parve sentire uno mirabile tremore incominciare nel mio petto da la sinistra parte e distendersi di subito per tutte le parti del mio corpo’ [I seemed to feel a strange throbbing which began in the left side of my breast and immediately spread to all parts of my body]: VN XIV, 4). Moreover, the line ‘d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza’ clearly evokes the incipit of Dante’s lyric ‘Io sento sì d’Amor la gran possanza’, which describes the overwhelming power of erotic love. The verse betrays a nostalgic quality (‘antico amor’) and a recuperation of worldly affection wholly at odds with Cato’s stark distantiation from Marcia at the beginning of the cantica. Perhaps most intriguingly, Dante appropriates the identity of Virgil’s Dido—a near embodiment of lustful passion in medieval culture—in the words ‘conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’ [I know the signs of the ancient flame] (Purg. XXX, 48), a translation of Virgil’s ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae’, which once again explicitly summons the affective past (‘l’antica fiamma) in this cantica of spiritual forward momentum. As I have explored elsewhere, these words would seem to signpost the unlikely presence (and redemption) of eros at the core of his ‘sacred poem’—a love unattainable to Virgil’s tragic character as well as to the more straightforwardly rationalistic, classicizing poetics of the Convivio, which plotted desire against reason, passion against virtue, in a more restrictive manner associated with Aeneas’s temperate and virile departure from Dido in Aeneid IV.39 As in Purgatorio XXVII, the pilgrim’s path to

39 See my essay ‘Dido, Aeneas, and the Evolution of Dante’s Poetics’, Dante Studies, 129 (2011), 135–60. On Dido here, see also P. Hawkins, ‘Dido, Beatrice, and the Signs of Ancient Love’, in Jacoff and Schnapp, eds, The Poetry of Allusion, pp. 113–30.

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God depends not on rational temperance but a submission to a passion at once erotic and spiritual.40 As noted above, this love for Beatrice aligns the Commedia poetically with the earlier Vita nova. Beatrice locates Dante’s transgressions squarely in the period that falls between the Vita nova and the Commedia, while the libello is presented as the true path that Dante squandered in the period following her death: ‘questi fu tal nella sua vita nova virtualmente, ch’ogne abito destro fatto avrebbe in lui mirabil prova. Ma tanto più maligno e più silvestro si fa ’l terren col mal seme e non cólto, quant’egli à più del bon vigor terrestro. Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto: mostrando gli occhi giovanetti a lui, meco il menava in dritta parte vòlto’. (Purg. XXX, 115–23) [This man in his new life potentially was such that each good disposition in him would have come to a marvellous conclusion, but the richer and more vigorous the soil, when planted ill and left to go to seed, the wilder and more noxious it becomes. For a time I let my countenance sustain him. Guiding him with my youthful eyes I drew him with me in the right direction.]

As well as to Dante’s youth, the words ‘vita nova’ (115) here doubtless refer to the work compiled under that ‘rubrica’ (VN I, 1). The trajectory of Dante’s moral and poetic career hitherto, according to Beatrice, has been one of promise followed by a regrettable lapse. The Vita nova was the ‘dritta parte’ [right direction] that Dante spurned in giving himself to others following her death (‘questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui’). This transgression would seem to concern the Convivio’s Lady Philosophy, as one of several palinodic gestures with respect to the treatise,41 but also 40 On medieval passio as a redemptive mode of love-suffering at odds with pagan stoicism, and its place in both religious and secular discourses, see Auerbach’s ‘Passio as passion’. 41 As Barolini puts it, the Vita nova is, in terms of the Commedia’s ‘inner poetic itinerary . . . an advancement over Convivio’: Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 37. The question of how Dante’s traviamento relates to the possible intellectual transgression of the Convivio is contentious. A number of episodes in the poem (Inf. XXVI, Purg. II, Par. II, Par. VIII, and Par. XXVIII) have been seen to critique the work’s more restricted focus on rational and philosophical concerns, while Beatrice’s allusion in canto XXXIII to ‘quella scuola / c’hai seguitata’ [that school that you have followed] (85–6) seems to evoke an intellectual trespass. However, since the treatise was not composed until around 1304–1307, and not circulated during Dante’s lifetime, one may question the extent to which it should be regarded as centrally implicated in Dante’s straying as dissected in the Earthly Paradise. On the Commedia’s palinodic handling of the Convivio, see for example Freccero, ‘Casella’s Song’; Hollander, ‘Purgatorio II’; A. Iannucci, ‘Casella’s Song and the Tuning of the Soul’, Thought, 65 (1992), 27–46; R. Jacoff, ‘The Post-

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Dante’s lyric poetry from the same ‘middle’ period, which conceived of Amor in more restrictive and destructive terms.42 If the Commedia is more consonant with the Vita nova in this respect, it would nonetheless be mistaken, as hinted at above, to regard the relationship between these two works as entirely harmonious, just as it would be mistaken to regard the Convivio and Commedia simply as adversarial.43 While acknowledging the affinities between the two texts, critics such as Barański and Moevs have considered the libello as a ‘failed’ work from the perspective of the Commedia, which was ultimately unsuccessful in orienting Dante’s desire towards God and away from the ephemeral.44 Moreover, for the Dante of the early 1300s, harshly exposed to the bitter factionalism of Italian politics, the conventional lyric world must have appeared a limited and rarefied one.45 The more muscular Convivio Palinodic Smile: Paradiso VIII and IX’, DS, 98 (1980), 111–22. Maria Corti has suggested that the treatise espouses heretical, neo-Averroist doctrines: see M. Corti, La felicità mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), and Dante a un nuovo crocevia (Florence: Sansoni, 1981). Others have highlighted what they see as the work’s overzealous fervour for secular knowledge. In Conv. III, xii, 14, Dante breathlessly exalts Philosophy (‘Oh nobilissimo ed eccellentissimo cuore che ne la sposa de lo Imperadore del cielo s’intende, e non solamente sposa, ma suora e figlia dilettissima’ [O most noble and excellent is that heart which directs its love toward the bride of the Emperor of heaven, and not the bride alone but the sister and the most beloved daughter!]), which, as sponsa Dei, seems to encroach upon the territory of theology. Scholars have thus associated Ulysses’ ‘folle volo’ in Inferno XXVI with Dante’s intellectual flight in the treatise: see J. Freccero, ‘Dante’s Ulysses: From Epic to Novel’, in The Poetics of Conversion, pp. 136–51; D. Thompson, ‘Dante’s Ulysses and the Allegorical Journey’, DS, 85 (1967), 33–58. It should be noted that the treatise itself accepts that certain matters lie beyond the capacity of the human intellect (see, especially, Conv. III, iv, 9–11). Nonetheless, the work’s more rationalistic basis would seem symptomatic of a period in which Dante’s interest in the spiritual dimension of his life was compromised, if not displaced, by his enthusiasm for secular concerns and knowledge. For an up-to-date summary of critical stances on the tensions and continuities between the treatise and the Commedia, see S. A. Gilson, ‘Reading the Convivio from Trecento Florence to Dante’s Cinquecento Commentators’, IS, 64 (2009), no. 2, 266–95 (pp. 267–8, n. 2). 42 On the implications of Dante’s ‘petrose’ and ‘pargoletta’ sequences here, see S. SturmMaddox, ‘The “Rime Petrose” and the Purgatorial Palinode’, Studies in Philology, 84, no. 2 (1987), 119–33, and my essay ‘Dante’s Cavalcantian Relapse’, respectively. 43 Among those critics who emphasize the intellectual and rhetorical continuities between the two works, see for example P. Dronke, Dante’s Second Love: The Originality and Contexts of the ‘Convivio’ (Exeter: Society for Italian Studies, 1997), pp. 72–6; J. Scott, ‘The Unfinished Convivio as a pathway to the Comedy’, DS, 113 (1995), 31–56, and Understanding Dante (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 107–42. 44 Barański refers to the ‘serious flaws in the libello’s make-up as a work of salvation, since it appears to have failed to keep its author on the “diritta via” ’ (‘New Life’, p. 10). Moevs writes that ‘The Beatrice of the Comedy is not impressed with the intellectual efforts of the Convivio; nor perhaps . . . with the inconstant and uncomprehending adulation of the Vita nova [which] did not prevent Dante from continuing to pursue “le presenti cose / col falso lor piacer” ’ (Metaphysics, p. 89). 45 ‘The Vita Nuova determinedly shies away from the real, from the tangible, from history . . . most strikingly it is incapable of dealing with evil’: Barański, ‘New Life’, pp. 14–15.

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attempted to open up the vernacular to pressing ethical, political, and philosophical questions, beyond the juvenile ambit of love, and this breadth of focus, and concern with the public domain, is evidently retained in the Commedia. Rather than simply privileging one work over the other, however, Dante constructs a far more synthetic paradigm of development than that set out in the philosophical treatise, whereby he is now beholden to theology as well as to philosophy, love as well as reason, Beatrice as well as Virgil. Indeed, it is a sign of the transformative way in which Dante approaches these categories that Beatrice, silent and twodimensional in the Vita nova, becomes the Commedia’s voice of doctrinal wisdom, at once the poem’s emotive fulcrum and its intellectual core.46 The integration of lyric and epic discourses, associated with the two principal guides, enables Dante to mediate between subjective and universal concerns in a way that eluded the two earlier works. Dante in the Commedia is evidently no less concerned with appropriating authority than he is in the Convivio,47 not merely as an heir to the classical auctores but as God’s very scribe, yet he does so without forsaking the affective vernacularity that is so important to him. While the Convivio’s author became ever more subordinate to the distant voices of authority, and the personal ceded to the universal, the Commedia remains the first-person account of a particular living, embodied man—a man held captive by fear, hope, and above all love. It tackles epic themes with lyric intimacy. The advent of Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, then, is where ordinarily opposing discourses and desires converge and become integrated. Beatrice generates a desire in the pilgrim that is oriented towards God and yet germinates from Dante’s ‘antico amor’. The theologized eros of the Vita nova is rehabilitated, but situated within a wider ethical and political framework indebted to the Convivio. A harmony is established between the two works, formerly opposed in their poetics and their philosophies of desire. 46 As critics have noted, the Beatrice of the Commedia assumes some of the characteristics of Lady Philosophy. Barolini, who herself writes of the ‘fusion of the affective with the intellective that will characterize the Commedia’ (Dante’s Poets, p. 29), sees the Beatrice of the Commedia as a synthesis of Lady Philosophy and the Vita nova’s Beatrice. On Beatrice’s speaking role in the Paradiso, as compared to the conventional courtly lady, see Barolini’s ‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax’, in Dante and the Origins, pp. 360–78. This integration of affective and intellective modes and discourses can also be considered in terms of the poem’s blending of theological traditions, as the Paradiso harmonizes ‘rational’ Scholastic-Aristotelian registers and the affective, corporeal metaphors of mysticism. On this yoking of ratio and affectus, see for example M. Ariani, ‘Mistica degli affetti e intelletto d’amore: Per una ridefinizione del canto XXIV del Paradiso’, Rivista di studi danteschi, 9 (2009), 29–56. 47 On the Commedia and auctoritas, see Ascoli, pp. 301–405.

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption 2.3 PARADI SO: EROTICS OF SALVATION

Dante’s erotic and affective response to Beatrice is not confined to Eden. References to her beauty abound in the final cantica, where her presence is more overtly physical than in the Vita nova. While human love was not rejected in the libello, Beatrice became increasingly ethereal and dematerialized,48 and a vital part of Dante’s spiritual growth lies in his capacity to love her beyond the grave, overcoming his attachment to her body. The Paradiso, by contrast, continually foregrounds Beatrice’s humanity and embodied beauty.49 The dominant model of desire associated with Dante and Beatrice in the Paradiso is exemplified succinctly in the opening canto, as the pilgrim gazes upon his beloved in the Earthly Paradise. At stake is a desire not concerned with carnal reciprocation, but with spiritual transcendence: ‘Beatrice tutta ne l’etterne rote / fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei / le luci fissi, di là su rimote’ [Beatrice had fixed her eyes upon the eternal wheels and I now fixed my sight on her, withdrawing it from above] (Par. I, 64–6). Beatrice here is a mediating presence. She gazes directly at the heavens, and thus at God, while Dante sees that divinity rendered accessible to his senses through Beatrice’s eyes. It is well known that throughout the Paradiso, until the pilgrim’s experience of the beatific vision, it is necessary for God to condescend to his imperfect faculties. Beatrice’s role can be understood to a great extent as a means of rendering divine truth comprehensible to the mortal, embodied pilgrim. She individualizes and corporealizes creation until, at the poem’s end, he can behold its source.50 We might compare this role to Scripture, as described by Beatrice in Paradiso IV, which attributes human features to God.51 In concretizing 48 ‘Like the ghostly landscape of the anonymous Florence where the story takes place, language in the Vita Nuova does not invoke much corporeality, not even its absence’: M. Gragnolati, ‘(In-)Corporeality, Language, Performance in Dante’s Vita Nuova and Commedia’, in Fortuna et al., eds, Dante’s Plurilingualism, pp. 211–22. 49 Joan Ferrante cites a number of examples of Dante’s very human relationship with Beatrice and his passionate response to her in the Paradiso; see ‘Beatrice’, in DE, pp. 89–95 (p. 94). Ferrante emphasizes, moreover, the importance of acknowledging Beatrice’s enduring historicity alongside her allegorical significance: ‘[Dante] imputes more and more meaning to her—as theology, revelation, faith, perhaps contemplation, and grace— but he never attempts, as he did with the donna gentile, to deny her reality as a woman he knew and loved. Those who would deny her historicity, like those who reject her allegorical significance, deny the fullness of Dante’s poetry’ (p. 95). 50 As Moevs writes, ‘beauty is the self-revelation of the infinite in the particular, of the ground of being through the forms that qualify it’ (Metaphysics, p. 100). On revelation of divinity through beauty in the Middle Ages, see also Lombardi, Wings, pp. 132–63. 51 ‘Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, / però che solo da sensato apprende / ciò che fa poscia d’intelletto degno. / Per questo la Scrittura condescende / a vostra facultate, e piede e mano / attribuisce a Dio e altro intende’ [It is necessary thus to address your faculties,

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metaphysical wonder, Beatrice grounds and humanizes a poem that could otherwise fall into silence or abstraction. She also facilitates the perfection of the pilgrim’s intellect: a process integral to his ascent through the heavenly spheres. From the very first canto (see Par. I, 82–96), desire for theological wisdom is eroticized (and erotic desire theologized), as the interplay between ignorance/desire and knowledge/fulfilment is continually calqued onto a courtly dynamic.52 However, this emphasis on the acquisition of theological wisdom, and Beatrice’s roles as celestial mediatrix and doctrinal spokesperson, do not exist in tension with the Paradiso’s lyric thrust. While the cantica was once considered dry and doctrinal, Barolini has emphasized the strong presence of lyric textuality in the Paradiso: a textuality that is not ‘discursive, logical, linear, “chronologized”, and . . . intellective’ but rather ‘nondiscursive, nonlinear, or circular, “dechronologized”, and affective’.53 Dante’s lyric identity is not forsaken but remains intact. As he reaches the Empyrean, he beholds the apotheosis of Beatrice’s heavenly splendour: Dal primo giorno ch’io vidi il suo viso in questa vita, infino a questa vista, non m’è il seguire al mio canto cantar preciso; ma or conven che mio seguir desista più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando, come a l’ultimo suo ciascuno artista. (Par. XXX, 28–33) [From the first day when in this life I saw her face until my vision of her now, pursuit of her in my song has never been cut off. But now I must desist in my pursuit, no longer following her beauty in my verse, as every artist, having reached his limit, must.]

Dante here claims that his poetry in praise of Beatrice must now desist. However, this cessation is not presented as a moral imperative, but a since only in perceiving through the senses can they grasp that which they then make fit for intellect. For this reason Scripture condescends to your capacity when it attributes hands and feet to God, but has another meaning] (Par. IV, 40–5). 52 See especially L. Pertile, ‘A Desire of Paradise and a Paradise of Desire’, in Iannucci, ed., Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 148–66. Pertile writes that ‘when desire is of an intellectual nature, the terms disio and dubbio appear to be interchangeable’ (p. 158), and considers Dante’s Paradise in terms of two distinct forms of contemplation, intellective and affective, discussed in Bernard’s commentary on the Song of Songs. 53 Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 221. The critic associates this lyric mode (‘characterized by apostrophes, exclamations, heavily metaphoric language, and intensely affective similes’), which proliferates in the final cantos of the poem, with the heavenly condition of uguaglianza. On this relationship between the harmonization of lyric and narrative in the Paradiso and its roots in the Vita nova, see also Barolini’s ‘Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova’, in Dante and the Origins, pp. 175–92.

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poetic one, for Beatrice’s beauty has now soared far beyond the capacity of human language. What I feel is crucial here is the continuity that Dante stresses between the love he felt upon first beholding Beatrice in Florence (‘[il] primo giorno ch’i’ vidi il suo viso’), which, as the libello documents, was plainly erotic, to his vision of her here in Paradise (‘questa vista’). We are reminded of her historicity at this most exalted moment. What is distinctive about Dante’s treatment of this relationship is the fluidity between these two forms of desire, the fact that his ascent to God has not required the bond between Dante’s poetry and his love for Beatrice to be severed (‘preciso’). The importance of Beatrice’s corporeal beauty and its connection to Dante’s affective past chimes with a wider tendency in the Paradiso to afford to the body a new dignity and importance. While the poem clearly condemns what Moevs terms ‘an exclusive self-identification with the body’,54 Gragnolati has highlighted the yearning on the part of heavenly souls for the return of the human flesh at the Last Judgement, one that complicates the denigration of the body associated with the earlier Purgatorio. This is not merely because the experience of beatitude will be sweeter once experienced by the composite of body and soul (see Par. XIV, 43–51), but, more intriguingly, because the souls will once again be able to enjoy the bodily company of their loved ones. The speaker of these lines, not insignificantly, is Solomon, the author of the Song of Songs and a figure strongly associated with the integration of affective and spiritual discourses:55 54

Moevs, Metaphysics, p. 96. Solomon was a controversial figure in the Middle Ages on account of his lustful past, and Augustine, for one, had questioned his salvation (De doctrina III, 21). Dante, however, not only saves Solomon, but makes him pre-eminent among the wise souls of the Sun (Par. X, 109–11). This is interesting when we consider the Paradiso’s transcendence of an Augustinian dichotomy between flesh and spirit. In contrast with the converted Bishop, Solomon’s continued association with earthly love was considerable (Nasti writes that he ‘fu considerato, al pari d’Ovidio, un auctoritas in fatto d’amore, non solo per la fama d’amatore esperto, quanto principalmente per il suo elogio della mulier fortis nei Proverbi e per l’appassionata lode della passione degli sposi elevata nel Cantico dei cantici’ [he was considered, as much as Ovid, an authority in the realm of love, not only thanks to his fame as an experienced lover, but especially for his praise of the mulier fortis in Proverbs and for his passionate account of the lovers of the Song of Songs]: p. 21). By placing such emphasis upon this contentious figure, Dante perhaps seeks to privilege Solomon as a figure who had attached greater value to love poetry as a means of interrogating spiritual truths, and whose writing offered a synthesis between desire and doctrine that anticipated Dante’s own poetry. The image of the clock in Paradiso X (lines 139–48), one of the most clearly sensual images of the Commedia, recalls the opening of the Song of Songs (see Nasti, pp. 178–9). Nasti notes that Dante here privileges the erotic literal sense in his reappropriation of the Song, suggesting that ‘È possibile che il poeta che in altri luoghi della Commedia (o delle sue opere giovanili) filtra e moralizza la lingua erotica del Cantico preferì, in questa occasione, non ingentilire il verso, non spiritualizzare la realtà, quasi a dimostrare che nel 55

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‘Tanto mi parver sùbiti e accorti e l’uno e l’altro coro a dicer “Amme!”, che ben mostrar disio d’i corpi morti: Forse non pur per lor, ma per le mamme, per li padri e per li altri che fuor cari anzi che fosser sempiterne fiamme’. (Par. XIV, 61–6) [So quick and eager seemed to me both choirs to say their Amen that they clearly showed their desire for their dead bodies, not perhaps for themselves alone, but for their mothers, for their fathers, and for others whom they loved before they became eternal flames.]

Barolini writes of this passage, suggestively in the context of the present discussion, that the ‘rhyme of mamme with fiamme, the flesh with the spirit, is one of Dante’s most poignant envisionings of a paradise where earthly ties are not renounced but enhanced’.56 Indeed, while the body in the Purgatorio has traditionally been understood primarily as a worldly attachment to be transcended, Gragnolati has argued that the failed embraces between Dante and Casella in canto II and Virgil and Statius in canto XXII also show that, without their fleshly bodies, the purgatorial souls feel incomplete. The Virgilian intertext used by Dante (of the failed embrace between Anchises and Aeneas in Aeneid VI) loads these failed embraces with the same longing that resurfaces in Paradiso XIV.57 While we saw how the Purgatorio endorses a denigration of the flesh, Gragnolati argues that in this paradisal canto the materiality of the body—what Barolini terms ‘that most irreducible husk of selfhood’58—contains ‘un irriducibile legame col passato’ [an irreducible link to the past].59 The consequences of this intriguing treatment of the body in Paradise are surely far reaching with regard to the relationship between Dante and Beatrice at the heart of the cantica. As Rachel Jacoff summarizes: ‘If the desire for the bodies of those who were dear before they became sempiternal flames is legitimate, there is indeed room in heaven for our specific affective histories.’60 In a recent lectura of Paradiso XIV, Gragnolati has vero Paradiso la lingua del desiderio è sempre e allo stesso tempo sensuale e spirituale, proprio come i signa della Bibbia’ [It is possible that the poet who, elsewhere in the Commedia (and his earlier works) filters and moralizes the erotic language of the Song, prefers here not to embellish it, not to spiritualize the reality, perhaps to demonstrate that in Paradise itself the language of desire is always at once sensual and spiritual, much like the words of the Bible] (p. 179). 56 Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 138. 57 See Gragnolati, ‘Nostalgia in Heaven’; and now Amor che move, pp. 91–110. 58 59 Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 138. Gragnolati, Amor che move, p. 109. 60 Jacoff writes: ‘The more one reads medieval theology, the more one appreciates the way that Dante’s imagination of wholeness transcends the dualisms and difficulties that haunt the question of embodiment’: R. Jacoff, ‘ “Our Bodies, Our Selves”: The Body in the

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indeed considered the nature of the pilgrim’s love for Beatrice in light of the ‘disio d’i corpi morti’ [desire for the dead bodies] at the heart of the canto. Love for Beatrice, like the heavenly souls’ longing for the physical flesh, emerges as an irreducible facet of Dante’s affective history that resists the disciplinary process of Purgatory and cannot be absorbed into a generalized experience of Paradise—‘una componente così legata alla singolarità dell’individuo e della sua storia che non può essere messa da parte’ [a component so linked to the singularity of the individual and its history that it cannot be relinquished].61 Gragnolati’s analysis of the poem’s embodied conception of selfhood offers a helpful way of accounting for the tensions associated with the Purgatorio outlined above: on the one hand, its denigration of earthly desires, bodies, and selves; on the other, its recuperation, through Beatrice, of the individual’s singular affective past that cannot be abandoned. The key question we must consider, in concluding this opening part of the book, is whether Dante’s desire for Beatrice, while evidently articulated through sensual language, continues to carry an erotic valence of some kind, or whether it is merely an expression of the pilgrim’s desire for God—and whether these two desires are ultimately integrated or remain adversarial. The matter is certainly complex, since we saw in Chapter 1 how spiritual desire in the Middle Ages was frequently expressed through the language of earthly love. While I have attempted to highlight above the continuity established in the Purgatorio and Paradiso with Dante’s lyric and erotic past, there are opposing elements to consider. Erotic language features in a range of contexts in the third cantica and emerges more generally, as elsewhere in medieval culture, as a privileged medium for articulating the ineffable experience of ‘trasumanar’ [‘transhumanization’] (Par. I, 70).62 It is well known that Beatrice’s appearance is heavily shrouded in Christological imagery, while her highly complex and multi-layered role Commedia’, in Cornish and Stewart, eds, Sparks and Seeds, pp. 119–37 (p. 120). And see Gragnolati: ‘Solomon connects desire for the body with desire to find one’s loved ones again, and indicates that, no matter how luminous, blessed and perfect they may be, even in Heaven the fleshless souls lack something. It is only after bodily return and the consequent recovery of identity—an identity that is not only corporeal but also connected with the affection felt for other individuals—that the ultimate happiness is possible’: ‘Nostalgia in Heaven’, p. 135. 61 M. Gragnolati, ‘Paradiso XIV e il desiderio del corpo’, Studi danteschi, 78 (2013), 1–25 (p. 25). 62 Psaki (‘Dante’s Redeemed Eroticism’, p. 17) offers a summary of some instances of erotic language found in the final cantica. These range from single phrases (Psaki cites ‘amoroso drudo’ [amorous lover]: Par. XII, 55) to allegorical situations (particularly in the closing lines of Paradiso X) and ‘interpenetrative’ linguistic inventions (particularly in Paradiso IX). Pertile notes how the intellectual exchanges between the pilgrim and Beatrice are modelled on erotic exchange: see ‘Desiderio di Paradiso’, p. 152. Zupan claims that the

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is evidently in part allegorical. There are various instances, particularly in the Purgatorio, where Virgil delegates Dante’s questions to Beatrice in a manner that encourages a straightforward allegorical interpretation of the relationship between the two guides.63 While insisting upon the importance of Beatrice’s historicity, Joan Ferrante associates Beatrice with the Virgin Mary, in helping Dante to understand the female side of an ‘androgynous’ Christian God, confined neither to a masculine nor a feminine gender,64 while Olivia Holmes shows how numerous connotations of the biblical Sapientia are incorporated into Beatrice’s character.65 In light of all this, can we still identify something radical and distinctive in Dante’s use of Beatrice in the Commedia? Is there at stake a more audacious integration than elsewhere in medieval culture or is this a further example of a wider cultural phenomenon of ‘two loves and one overlapping rhetoric’, as Lombardi puts it?66 This thorny question of the value ascribed by Dante to earthly love has been confronted by Lino Pertile, who argues cogently that for all the erotic language we find there, the Paradiso is a realm where erotic love has no place. It is striking, he argues, that nowhere in the poem do we find exemplary earthly love.67 The souls in the Heaven of Venus are repentant lovers, who find themselves saved very much in spite of their erotic pasts.68 Pertile goes on to note that the role of guide in the final cantos of the poem that we would expect, on the basis of Inferno II, to be ascribed to St Lucy, is in fact granted to St Bernard.69 He contends that, in choosing Bernard over Lucy, Dante deliberately draws a stark line between love for the lady and love for God, concluding that ‘there is no room for earthly love in Paradise: l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle and amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona remain to the end powerful and irreconcilable adversaries’.70

theologians’ dance in Paradiso X, 139–48 is based on a medieval erotic dawn song: see P. Zupan, ‘The New Dantean Alba’, Lectura Dantis, 7 (Fall 1990), 92–9. 63 For instance, Virgil states: ‘Quanto ragion qui vede / dir ti poss’io; da indi in là t’aspetta / pur a Beatrice, ch’è opera di fede’ (Purg. XVIII, 46–8). Virgil can be seen to represent reason unaccompanied by faith, and Beatrice theology. 64 See J. M. Ferrante, Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992). 65 On Beatrice’s links to Sapientia and Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, see Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, pp. 35–67. 66 Lombardi, Wings, p. 13. 67 See L. Pertile, ‘Does the Stilnovo Go to Heaven’, in Barolini and Storey, eds, Dante for the New Millenniumi, pp. 104–14. For an Italian version of the essay, see ‘Dimenticare Beatrice’, in La punta del disio, pp. 235–46. 68 69 Pertile, ‘Stilnovo’, p. 105. Pertile, ‘Stilnovo’, pp. 111–13. 70 Pertile, ‘Stilnovo’, p. 114.

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Pertile thus regards any erotic aspect of Dante’s love for Beatrice as entirely incompatible with his love for God. One can certainly follow the critic’s reasoning: we find strong indictments of erotic love in all three cantiche, and, given the widespread use of erotic language in mystical and mariological writings, it would be easy to dismiss its usage in the Commedia as a rhetorical expediency. But I would argue that such a reading, or any that confines Beatrice’s function to the allegorical and theological, is ultimately too dualistic, placing too little emphasis upon the bold decision that Dante makes in affording her—a historical figure so unmistakably linked to Dante’s erotic past—such a pivotal role in his poem, while overlooking the complex handling of the body in the final cantica. We cannot in my view reduce love in the Commedia to a dichotomy between the unalloyed eros of Francesca and the depersonalized, cosmological love described in the poem’s closing lines, when the love that leads Dante through ninety-seven of the poem’s one hundred cantos resists confinement to either of these opposing categories. Beatrice’s presence in the poem, I would argue, is not orthodox but radical and polemical: it shows that Dante inscribes the poem not only into classical and sacred traditions of writing but also into the secular lyric tradition of his youth, and making new and audacious claims for the form of desire with which that tradition is associated. The final three cantos of the Paradiso, where Bernard replaces Beatrice as Dante’s guide, perhaps point to the anxieties surrounding this operation, to the demarcation that Dante ultimately feels he must impose between God and the lady, and their associated loves. God must, by necessity, be the unequivocal destination of Dante’s journey and of his desire. Nonetheless, within the context of a medieval Christian poem, the role ascribed to Beatrice and Dante’s love for her could not be more privileged. The demarcation in question, signalled by Dante’s prayer for Beatrice and her final smile, is anything but stark, and the transition from Beatrice to God is not one of opposition but of tranquility. Indeed, the disappearance of Beatrice far from signals the end of erotic reference in the Paradiso. The language of Bernard’s petition to Mary is among the most erotic and ‘lyrical’ in the poem;71 the white robes of the souls in the Empyrean (‘le bianche stole’: Par. XXX, 29) carry a powerful association with the resurrected flesh;72 and commentators have noted how the 71 Jeffrey Schnapp describes it as ‘an intensified vernacular lyric crossbred with the Latin of the Church’: Schnapp, p. 218. Joan Ferrante describes Dante’s desire for Mary as ‘sexual but free of sin, as sex was meant to be in paradise’: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 150. 72 Compare the previous use of the expression in Paradiso XXV, 95.

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‘candida rosa’ [white rose] (Par. XXXI, 1) in which the blessed souls reside evokes the profane white rose of sensual desire in the Roman de la Rose. Even at these culminating and exalted moments of the poem, postBeatrice, Dante is intent on probing and problematizing the relationship between eros and caritas, body and spirit. Recognizing Dante’s continuing emphasis upon the body of Beatrice in the Paradiso, different perspectives on the pilgrim’s love for Beatrice have emerged, most notably from Regina Psaki. Psaki argues that the essence of the pilgrim’s love for Beatrice is one ‘no less sexual than blessed, no less erotic than salvific’:73 I cannot conclude that for Dante ideal erotic love is desexualized, purged of the corporeal, superseded by a generalized and purely mental communion. The individual matters; the relationship with Beatrice powers the entire journey; and Dante insists too heavily on the return of the body for his experience of Beatrice to remain aphysical.74

For Psaki, divine love does not simply ‘correct’ sexual love; rather, the two ‘have been untangled, and sex can inhabit the sacred’.75 Such a reading of Dante’s love for Beatrice chimes with other recent readings of the Paradiso, which highlight its continual concern with overcoming worldly dualisms. The Paradiso is a realm of constant paradox, governed by the synthesis of notionally conflictual entities. The worldly–spiritual dialectics associated with the Purgatorio are replaced by something more synthetic, no longer to be understood in terms of the Aristotelian earthly logic that governed the Convivio, and captured in the polysemous language of poetry.76 As Moevs puts it, Dante’s aim in the Commedia is ‘to heal the fracture of theological dualism, between the spiritual world and the 73 Psaki, ‘Love for Beatrice’, p. 119. See also Holmes: ‘[Beatrice] never loses her erotic specificity or ceases to be [for Dante] the paradigmatic example of female physical beauty (understood as an aid, rather than a hindrance to faith), as she has been since the lyrics of the Vita nova’ (Dante’s Two Beloveds, p. 27). And later: ‘The protagonist discovers that what is decisive is not that he choose the right, but that he choose rightly, for the right reasons, and that by rejecting the profane for the sacred, Beatrice’s human beauty, say, for her divine virtue, or matter for form, he earns both, he has his cake and eats it too’ (p. 34). Barolini states: ‘The Beatrice of the Commedia preserves many of the erotic markers of the lady in the courtly lyric, and, like the lady in the courtly lyric, her poetic existence is predicated on the needs of her lover-poet’ (‘Gendered History’, p. 367). Ferrante states that ‘What is unusual in Dante’s view of love, particularly after the thirteenth century, is that human love between man and woman is not just a figure for the love of man and God, but a necessary step towards that love. One love does not cancel the other out; the one augments the other’: Ferrante, p. 130. 74 75 Psaki, ‘Love for Beatrice’, p. 119. Psaki, ‘Love for Beatrice’, p. 119. 76 See S. Fortuna and M. Gragnolati, ‘Dante after Wittgenstein: “Aspetto”, Language, and Subjectivity from Convivio to Paradiso’, in Fortuna et al., eds, Dante’s Plurilingualism, pp. 223–48; Moevs; Raffa.

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sensible universe, into a perfect and continuous unity’.77 For Raffa, the model for this overcoming of dialectic is the Incarnation, which encapsulates the non-dualistic relationship between man and God, flesh and spirit. Beatrice might be seen to embody this ‘incarnational’ attempt to overcome dualism, at once angelic, Christological ‘miracolo’, and secular Florentine woman, ethereal and embodied, stimulating embodied desire and bearing beatitude.78 As Erich Auerbach showed in what remain some of the most compelling pages written on Dante’s Beatrice, the Commedia’s figural realism demands that we always account for both poles of her character in their concrete reality, the historical figure and the eschatological fulfilment. Auerbach’s figural understanding salvages Beatrice from abstraction and shows that a narrow and overdetermined theological reading underplays her historicity and the poem’s ‘sensuous reality’.79 Psaki’s thesis—that ‘not all sexual loves are salvific, but this exemplary salvific love between a man and a woman remains sexual’80—is one I endorse and aim, in the second part of this book, to further substantiate, through my analysis of Dante’s engagement with Guittone, Arnaut, and Folco. In each case, Dante critiques the poet in question on account of a dualism that compromises his poetic and/or spiritual integrity, an inability to generate a vernacular poetics that can orient that lyric nucleus of language, love, and selfhood towards God. The dualism of Guittone and Folco is manifested in a model of conversion whereby vernacular poetry is severed from love, replaced by a universalizing, dispassionate, anti-lyric discourse. The intense and unswerving erotic commitment of Arnaut, meanwhile, cannot be reconciled with his commitment to God. In each case, the lyric paradigm is defined by a tension and opposition that Dante carefully negotiates in formulating a redeemed and redemptive lyric praxis. This chapter has proposed a reading of the Commedia’s poetics that foregrounds Dante’s enduring lyric and erotic commitment and attempts to resist a dualistic paradigm of conversion and desire that would sever vernacular poetry from the love with which it is so strongly associated. 77

Moevs, p. 38. Similarly, Holmes states that ‘Dante is not really a binary thinker . . . but a Trinitarian one, and when he proposes a thesis and an antithesis he generally looks for a synthesis; the poem’s aim is arguably to describe a larger Truth in which all differences, including those between male and female, intellect and matter, and the creator and the creation are reconciled’: Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, p. 3. Raffa compares this ‘healing’ of conflicts in spiritual transcendence to Hegel’s Aufhebung: the ‘simultaneous erasure and preservation of contradictions as they are raised up’ (p. 9). 78 Olivia Holmes describes Beatrice as ‘an alternative to carnal desire and, at the same time, an end to its negative valence, an overcoming of the flesh–spirit dichotomy’: Dante’s Two Beloveds, p. 28. 79 See Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Time, History, and Literature, pp. 65–113 (pp. 110–13). 80 Psaki, ‘Dante’s Redeemed Eroticism’, p. 14.

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The love lyric, far from being rejected along with Francesca in Inferno V, remains integral to the Commedia, as love for the lady and love for God are brought into radical alignment. As we saw in Chapter 1, this poetics of integration is informed by a pervasive interplay between secular and spiritual discourses of desire in medieval culture. It is also informed by Dante’s desire to combine his pursuit of a depersonalized brand of cultural authority, associated with ethics and spiritual orthodoxy, with a commitment to the vernacular as an affective form of language imbued with desire and embodied subjectivity. Dante’s means of overcoming these tensions, between competing forms of love and competing aspects of his cultural inheritance, is through Beatrice, whom I consider no less than an agent of synthesis and integration, a uniquely conceived figure who generates a unique poetics. Beatrice is carefully situated by Dante upon a series of fault lines—between history and eternity, body and spirit, desire and intellect, the personal and the cosmological—with a view to mediating between these categories and at once redeeming, eroticizing, and authorizing his vernacular poetics. She enables him to direct himself towards God without resorting to the arid moralizing of Guittone—to submit to his desire without surrendering to the untamed and debilitating eros of Arnaut. Dante’s most explicit elaboration of his praxis in penning the Commedia comes in his exchange with the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca in Purgatorio XXIV—a crucial and endlessly debated episode with respect to his poetic identity, to which I shall return at other points in this book. Dante first defines himself with reference to the Vita nova’s ideological centrepiece, the canzone ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’. He then famously describes his way of writing in a manner that presents his poetry (whether he refers to the libello, the Commedia, or both is debated) as the ‘transcription’ of the dictates of Love, a fluid and spontaneous expression of desire: ‘Io mi son un, che quando / Amor mi spira, noto; e a quel modo / che ei ditta dentro vo significando’ [I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note and, as he dictates deep within me, so I set forth] (lines 52–4). What is this Love? Critics have rightly identified in this selfdefinition echoes of the ‘inspired’ activity of the human authors of Scripture. In this light, the lines reinforce Dante’s status as a scriba dei, and the poem’s status as a visionary work no less than scriptural in its significance and authority.81 At the same time, the emphasis placed upon 81 On the link here between Dante’s poetry and divine inspiration and authority, see for example Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, pp. 52–4; R. Hollander ‘Dante’s “dolce stil novo” and the Comedy’, in Dante: Mito e poesia: Atti del secondo Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. by M. Picone and T. Crivelli (Florence: Cesati, 1999), pp. 263–81. R. Martinez, ‘The

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the fluid relationship between love and poetry (and let us remember the statement takes place in a discussion between love poets) evokes the courtly maxim that poetic worth is contingent upon the experience and authentic expression of Amor. I would argue that it would be wrong to deny either the scriptural or the lyric resonance of these crucial lines; rather, the two discourses, and the two loves, collapse into one another.82 Love for Beatrice is the locus where ordinarily conflicting loves no longer clash but coincide, enabling a vernacular poetics that uniquely bridges the gap between the poet’s erotic history and his duty to God.

Pilgrim’s Answer to Bonagiunta and the Poetics of the Spirit’, Stanford Italian Review, 3 (1983), 37–63; Mazzotta, Poet of the Desert, pp. 204–10; Moevs, pp. 88–9; Pertile, ‘Le penne e il volo’, in La punta del disio, pp. 115–35 (pp. 124–5). On the Augustinian resonance of these lines, see Marchesi, passim but especially pp. 144–53. 82 Vittorio Montemaggi offers a similar perspective in a recent essay: ‘No contradiction need be seen between these [courtly and scriptural] readings. One of the defining characteristics of the Vita Nuova, in relation to which Dante is identified by Bonagiunta, is its fusion of reflection on earthly and divine love. Thus “Amor” is accurately read here as referring not only to the love of love poetry but also to God’: ‘In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia’, in Montemaggi and Treherne, eds, Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, pp. 60–94 (p. 71).

PART II NEGOTIATING PRECURSORS

3 Guittone d’Arezzo Guittone d’Arezzo (1235–1294) was a figure of major importance in the development of early Italian literary culture, composing some three hundred poems and forty vernacular prose letters and engaging in dialogue with numerous contemporary poets.1 As well as writing a considerable number of love lyrics, he was—following a mid-career conversion—the first poet to introduce moral and political themes to the Italian lyric tradition,2 and, to a greater extent than any other Italian before Dante, constructed a highly distinctive and historically determined poetic ‘I’.3 For all his importance, however, Guittone was a divisive figure. While for his many imitators he a ‘dittatore culturale’ [cultural dictator],4 for others—above all Dante—he was the object of considerable scorn. Dante’s most explicit criticisms of Guittone are found in the De vulgari eloquentia, where he condemns the ‘municipal’ and ‘plebeian’ verse of Guittone and his followers (DVE I, xiii, 1; II, vi, 7–8), and in the Purgatorio. In Purgatorio XXIV, Guittone finds himself on the wrong side of the vexed ‘nodo’ [knot] in Dante’s very strategic literary historiography—a passage

1 Citations from Guittone’s first eighty-six erotic sonnets (to which I refer as his ‘canzoniere’) are taken from Leonardi’s edition, while those from his canzoni (roman numerals) and ars amandi sonnets (87–110) are taken from Guittone d’Arezzo, Rime, ed. by F. Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940), unless otherwise stated. Translations of Guittone’s poetry are my own. 2 There had, however, been an important strain of moral poetry in the Occitan tradition. See C. Léglu, ‘Moral and satirical poetry’, in Gaunt and Kay, eds, The Troubadours, pp. 47–65. 3 ‘Guittone . . . personalizza quell’io lirico . . . e crea un corpus poetico dove la voce che dice io non è mai l’ipostasi del “poeta”, ma è quel poeta che si chiama Guittone, del poeta che diventa davvero il “personaggio” delle sue liriche’ [Guittone personalizes that lyric ‘I’ and creates a poetic corpus where the voice that says ‘I’ is never the voice of the generic ‘poet’, but is the voice of the poet called Guittone, the poet who becomes the true protagonist of his lyrics]: P. Cherchi, ‘Omaggio a Guittone (1294–1994)’, Italica, 72 (1995), no. 2, 125–42 (p. 135). See also O. Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, pp. 47–69, and ‘ “S’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio”: The Construction of Authenticity in the Canzoniere of Frate Guittone and Guittone d’Arezzo (MS Laurenziano Rediano 9)’, Modern Philology, 95 (1997), no. 2, 170–99. 4 Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, p. 61.

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variously seen by critics as alluding to the stylistic, intellectual, and/or spiritual limitations of his poetry:5 ‘Ma dì s’i’ veggio qui colui che fore trasse le nove rime, cominciando “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” ’. E io a lui: ‘I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando’ ‘O frate, issa vegg’io’, diss’ elli, ‘il nodo che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’odo! Io veggio ben come le vostre penne di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, che de le nostre certo non avvenne; e qual più a gradire oltre si mette, non vede più da l’uno a l’altro stilo’; e, quasi contentato, si tacette. (Purg. XXIV, 49–62) [‘But tell me if I see before me the one who brought forth those new rhymes begun with “Ladies who have intelligence of love” .’ And I to him: ‘I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and as he dictates deep within me, so I set forth.’ ‘O my brother’, he said, ‘now I understand the knot that kept the notary, Guittone, and me on this side of the sweet new style I hear. I clearly understand that your pens follow faithfully whatever Love may dictate, which, to be sure, was not the case with ours. And he who takes the next step sees in this what separates the one style from the other.’ Then, as though with satisfaction, he was silent.]

Guittone, along with the pilgrim’s interlocutor Bonagiunta and the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini, forms part of the ancien régime of the Italian lyric, whose poetry is placed in opposition to Dante’s ‘sweet new style’.6 This 5 For bibliography on the passage, see Chapter 2, n. 81. Other important readings include G. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Medieval Culture, trans. by R. L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 124–31; Z. G. Barański, ‘ “’nfiata labbia” and “dolce stil novo”: A Note on Dante, Ethics, and the Technical Vocabulary of Literature’, in Sotto il segno di Dante, ed. by L. Coglievina and D. De Robertis (Florence: Le lettere, 1998), pp. 17–35; Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 40–57 and 85–90; Giunta, La poesia medievale; G. Gorni, Il nodo della lingua e il verbo d’amore: Studi su Dante e altri duecentisti (Florence: Olschki, 1981). With respect to the meaning of the ‘nodo’, I accept Pertile’s reading in ‘Il nodo di Bonagiunta’ (La punta del disio, pp. 85–113), which argues that it is the knot that prevents the falcon from breaking into flight. See also D. Boccassini, Il volo della mente: falconeria e sofia nel mondo mediterraneo: Islam, Federico II, Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2003), pp. 335–8. 6 As Giunta shows in La poesia italiana, the dichotomy established here between Bonagiunta and the ‘sweet new style’ seemingly inaugurated by Guinizzelli (‘il padre mio . . .’) is in fact misleading, since Bonagiunta is closer in style and in spirit to Guinizzelli than to Guittone. It is well known that Dante’s account of the development of early Italian poetry always serves his own purposes. Roberto Rea describes Dante’s ‘intento di fondo di riscrivere

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much-debated passage, to which I return in Chapter 4, would seem to underline both the lack of an authentic spiritual basis for Guittone’s poetics and a disjuncture—perhaps owing to his overwrought style— between poetry and its source of inspiration, which should always be love. In Purgatorio XXVI, meanwhile, through the character of Guido Guinizzelli,7 Dante aligns the extremely influential Guittone with the troubadour Giraut de Bornelh, as ethical poets whose verse has traditionally received excessive acclaim: ‘O frate,’ disse, ‘questi ch’io ti cerno col dito,’ e additò un spirto innanzi, ‘fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno. Versi d’amore e prose di romanzi soverchiò tutti; e lascia dir li stolti che quel di Lemosì credon ch’avanzi. A voce più ch’al ver drizzan li volti, e così ferman sua oppinïone prima ch’arte o ragion per lor s’ascolti. Così fer molti antichi di Guittone, di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio, fin che l’ha vinto il ver con più persone’.

(Purg. XXVI, 115–26)

[‘O brother’, he said, ‘that one whom I point out to you’—and he pointed to a spirit just ahead—‘was a finer / the finest craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses and in tales of romance he surpassed them all, and let the fools go on who think that fellow from Limoges was better. They favour hearsay over truth and thus arrive at their opinions without the use of reason or skill. The same was true of many long ago about Guittone, voice after voice shouting praise of him alone, until for most the truth at last prevailed.’]

Guittone and Giraut are, indeed, declared inferior to the love poets Guido Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel (‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’), as Dante offers an apparent endorsement of love poetry at the same moment as he underlines its association with the sin of lust. This contradicts the la storia della lirica aulica a proprio vantaggio, ridefinendo ruoli e genealogie, riassegnando meriti e demeriti, denunciando e tacendo a secondo delle convenienze’ [attempt to rewrite the history of the courtly lyric to his own advantage, recasting roles and genealogies, reassigning strengths and weaknesses, denouncing and remaining silent to suit his purposes] (p. 1). 7 The fact that it is Guinizzelli who voices this critique of Guittone was traditionally interpreted as palinodic on the part of Guido, owing to the apparent deference towards the Aretine witnessed in his sonnet ‘O caro padre meo’. See for example Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, pp. 59–60; E. H. Wilkins, ‘Guinizelli Praised and Corrected’, in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959), pp. 111–13. More recently, scholars have read Guinizzelli’s sonnet as ironic and critical of his purported maestro: see P. Borsa, La nuova poesia di Guinizzelli (Florence: Cadmo, 2007), 47–88; Rea; Steinberg, pp. 17–60.

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stance of the De vulgari (II, ii, 6–8), where Giraut and moral poetry were deemed superior to Arnaut and love poetry—another matter to which I shall return.8 Thus, while Guittone does not appear as a character in the Commedia, he is nonetheless a vital presence, at the heart of Dante’s attempts to rewrite lyric history to his own advantage. Dante’s hostility towards Guittone is thus a rare constant in a career of incessant evolution. The Aretine is, for Dante, the poet emblematic of the ‘bad old days’ of the Italian lyric; the days of stilted poetic language, rhetorical indulgence, and unwarranted acclaim. This hostility is known to mask a certain debt. As well as influencing Dante’s early love poetry, Guittone’s ethical and political verse clearly made an impression on the Florentine, and we ought to remain mindful of a certain ‘Oedipal anxiety’ when assessing Dante’s attitude towards his forerunner.9 However, the fact that Dante protests rather too much should not distract us from the very real questions of style and ideology that underlie his disdain. Despite his cultural hegemony in the late Duecento, Guittone was for a long time dismissed by modern critics, and Dante would doubtless have

8 On Giraut’s demotion, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 96–100 and 108–12; Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, pp. 56–7; Picone, ‘Giraut de Bornelh’. On the metaliterary dimension of this canto more generally, see L. Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria e costruzione narrativa nel XXVI del Purgatorio’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Classe di lettere e filosofia, XVIII (1988), 1035–65; Giunta, La poesia italiana, pp. 47–73; M. Marti, ‘Il XXVI del Purgatorio come omaggio d’arte: Guinizzelli e Daniello nel cammino poetico di Dante’, in Studi su Dante (Galatina: Congedo, 1984), pp. 153–72. Some critics have argued that Guittone is also attacked in Purgatorio XI, as the first of the two ‘Guidi’ (usually presumed to be Guido Cavalcanti) who are now surpassed by an ‘altro’—surely Dante himself. See G. di Pino, ‘Così ha tolto l’uno all’altro Guido’, in Temi di Critica Dantesca (Bari: Adriatica, 1973), pp. 103–22; G. Gorni, ‘Guittone e Dante’, in Guittone d’Arezzo nel settimo centenario della morte: Atti del Convegno internazionale di Arezzo (22–24 aprile 1994), ed. by M. Picone (Florence: Cesati, 1995), pp. 309–35; Picone, ‘Guittone, Guinizzelli, Dante’. This position is justified by the fact that, as noted by Picone, some manuscripts of the De vulgari name Guittone ‘Guidonem Aretinum’. 9 The expression is taken from Steinberg, p. 3. The Guittonian flavour of Dante’s early exchange of sonnets with Dante da Maiano (Rime 1–4) and of several lyrics included in the early chapters of the Vita nova is widely accepted; Dante’s moral canzoni ‘Le dolci rime’ (Conv. IV), ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ (Rime 30), and ‘Doglia mi reca’ (Rime 49) all owe something to Guittone’s moral verse, as I discuss in Section 3.2. On Dante’s debt to Guittone as a political poet, see N. Del Sal, ‘Guittone (e i guittoniani) nella Commedia’, SD, 61 (1989), 109–52 (pp. 142–52); C. E. Honess, ‘Dante and Political Poetry in the Vernacular’, in Dante and his Literary Precursors: Twelve Essays, ed. by J. C. Barnes and J. Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 117–51 (pp. 125–35); F. Mazzoni, ‘Tematiche politiche fra Guittone e Dante’, in Picone, ed., Guittone d’Arezzo, pp. 165–76. Given the vagaries of textual transmission in the Middle Ages, the precise extent of Dante’s familiarity with Guittone’s poetry is impossible to define. However, given Guittone’s prominence, both in Dante’s work and the Duecento lyric at large, it would seem methodologically unproblematic to assume Dante had a substantial acquaintance with his predecessor’s work.

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revelled in the enduring influence of his antagonism.10 Yet Guittone merits a more serious and objective consideration than he has traditionally received, and recent scholarship has recognized the need to re-evaluate him on his own terms.11 Existing studies on his relationship to Dante have largely concerned questions of style, socio-political factors, or else the common ground between the poets’ moral and political verse.12 My focus in this chapter will instead be on questions of their ideology, as both amatory and ethical poets, that I believe have been lent too little weight in existing scholarship concerning their relationship.13 I argue that Guittone acts as a continual point of reference for Dante—as both a model and an anti-model—in defining and refining his poetics. In 10 An influential and brutal critique of Guittone’s poetry was provided by De Sanctis: ‘Guittone non è poeta, ma un sottile ragionatore in versi, senza quelle grazie e leggiadrie che con sì ricca vena d’immaginazione ornano i ragionamenti di Guinicelli. Non è poeta, e non è neppure artista: gli manca quella interna misura e melodia, che condusse poeti inferiori a lui di coltura e d’ingegno a polire il volgare. È privo di gusto e di grazia’ [Guittone is not a poet but a subtle reasoner in verse, lacking those airs and graces which adorn the pronouncements of Guinizzelli. He is neither a poet nor an artist: he lacks that internal measure and melody that leads poets less intelligent and cultivated than him to refine the literary vernacular. He is without taste and grace]: F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. by G. Contini, 2 vols (Turin: UTET, 1968), I, 31. 11 See, for example, Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 85–123, ‘Sotto benda’, and ‘Anatomy of Desire’; A. Borra, Guittone d’Arezzo e le maschere del poeta: La lirica cortese tra ironia e palinodia (Ravenna: Longo, 2000); Giunta, La poesia italiana; Leonardi, Canzoniere, and ‘Guittone cortese?’, Medioevo romanzo, 13 (1988), 421–55; V. Moleta, The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976); Picone, ed., Guittone d’Arezzo; Steinberg, esp. pp. 13–60. 12 On the poets’ stylistic divergence, see G. Bolognese, ‘Dante and Guittone Revisited’, Romanic Review, 70 (1979), 172–84; S. Millspaugh, ‘Trobar clus in the Early Italian Lyric: Textual Enclosure, Social Space, and the Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo’, Italian Studies, 68, no. 1, 1–16; on Guittone’s enduring stylistic influence, see Del Sal; M. Marti, ‘Guittone e i guittoniani’, in ED, III, 334–6. Some critics have linked Dante’s antagonism to Guittone’s association with the religious order of the ‘Frati Gaudenti’, attacked for their moral laxity in the bolgia of the hypocrites (Inf. XXIII): see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 105–6; Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, p. 61; Steinberg, pp. 17–60. 13 The poets’ difference in ideology with regard to love has been acknowledged by Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, pp. 93–7. Other ideological aspects are considered in the essays ‘Anatomy of Desire’ and ‘Sotto benda’. While Barolini does not focus on this matter in depth, her stance corresponds to my own: ‘Both Guittone and Cavalcanti divorce love from reason. In this essential respect, both stand in sharp opposition to Dante, who considers the presence of reason to be the indispensable guarantee of that which is truly love, and not lust’, p. 97. In an earlier version of the essay ‘Sotto benda’, Barolini in fact states that Guittone ‘would repay study as a model that Dante both attended to and rejected’—a challenge I essentially take up in this chapter: T. Barolini, ‘Beyond (Courtly) Dualism: Thinking about Gender in Dante’s Lyrics’, in Barolini and Storey, eds, Dante for the New Millennium, pp. 65–89 (p. 89, n. 14). Holmes and Cherchi also note differences between the poets’ respective theories of love, albeit in passing: see Holmes, ‘Construction of Authenticity’, p. 199; Cherchi, ‘Omaggio a Guittone’, p. 131. I believe these differences are of major, not minor, importance in understanding the poets’ relationship, and offer important insights into our understanding of Dante’s wider handling of love.

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particular, I see him as crucially implicated in the question of Dante’s erotic commitment. More than any of his precursors, Guittone’s lyric production, in striving for a morally robust poetics, places in stark opposition the aspects that Dante’s poetry ultimately seeks to integrate: eros and spirituality, subjectivity and poetic authority, the affective and the intellective. His precedent continually looms over Dante in his attempts to create a new and very different kind of spiritually viable vernacular poetry. Thus, by re-evaluating the poets’ relationship, we can shed light upon the questions raised in the first part of this book and reinforce its central hypotheses.

3.1 DANTE’S VITA NOVA AND GUITTONE’S (ANTI-)COURTLY ‘CANZONIERE’ The ideological opposition between Dante and Guittone that concerns me in this chapter is illuminated by two lyric-narrative experiments that are produced by the poets early in their respective careers: Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ of eighty-six courtly sonnets and Dante’s Vita nova.14 These two collections provide a useful point of comparison in considering the poets’ relationship, for they respond to similar questions and tensions: the relationship between love and poetic worth, the moral status of conventional courtly poetry, and the possibility (or otherwise) of valorizing lyric desire. Moreover, each lyric-narrative sequence endeavours to provide a clearer and more unified sense of the poet’s distinctive theory of love. The forms respond to the limitations imposed by thirteenth-century manuscript culture:15 in a context where a poet’s lyrics were, by and large, read in isolation and anthologized by a third-party compilator, the author himself had little control over which of his poems were privileged or 14 A version of this section has been published as T. Kay, ‘Redefining the “matera amorosa”: Dante’s Vita nova and Guittone’s (anti-)courtly “canzoniere” ’, The Italianist, 29 (2009), 369–99. 15 See Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self; R. Leporatti, ‘ “Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna” (V.N., XLII, 2): La Vita nuova come retractatio della poesia giovanile di Dante in funzione della Commedia’, in La gloriosa donna de la mente: A Commentary on the Vita nuova, ed. by V. Moleta (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 249–91 (pp. 265–78). The Fiore, another important lyric-narrative operation that challenges the courtly ethos, should also be noted. Indeed, its structure, which creates a narrative through its 232 sonnets, is closely linked to Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’. I choose not to focus upon the Fiore since its ideology is less quintessentially ‘Dantean’ than that of the Vita nova, and because its authorship remains a matter of contention. For important essays on the work, see The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany, ed. by Z. G. Barański and P. Boyde (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997).

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how they were interpreted. Yet while the sequences display certain parallels, the different ways in which they ultimately respond to the tensions they interrogate serve as an effective introduction to their authors’ ideological dissent. Guittone’s corpus is conventionally divided between an amatory phase (under the name ‘Guittone’) and a moral phase (‘Fra Guittone’). This bipartition reflects the structure of the thirteenth-century Laurenziano Rediano 9 manuscript, which pivots upon the poet’s conversion and his joining of the lay Franciscan order of the Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae (popularly known as the ‘Frati gaudenti’ [Jovial Friars]) in 1265.16 Fra Guittone defines his identity in opposition to his younger self, attacking love in unambiguous terms. His verse constantly constructs antitheses between reason and desire, between the rectitude of his present commitment to God and the folly of his erstwhile submission to Amor. Despite this stark dichotomy, however, scholars have begun to regard the relationship between the constituent halves of Guittone’s lyric production as more fluid than the poet would have us believe. The notion that his conversion manifesto ‘Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare’ [Now it will become apparent if I shall know how to sing] (XXV), which opens the second half of his collection, corresponds to a biographical epiphany has been challenged in particular by Lino Leonardi, who identifies an anti-courtly thrust in Guittone’s erotic poetry. Rather than reflecting a sudden shift of ideology, the bipartition of Guittone’s corpus aims to lend it an Augustinian gravitas,17 relating it to the poet’s joining of the Franciscan order and grounding it in ‘an apparently historical spiritual crisis’.18 In light of Leonardi’s work, it seems that the poet’s suspicion towards the value of love poetry—while it intensifies—is in fact always present.19 There are 110 surviving erotic sonnets by Guittone, written prior to his conversion. Leonardi argues that the first eighty-six of these form a single narrative sequence,20 which he views as the first Italian 16 Lino Leonardi shows that the poet himself is also very attentive to this opposition between ‘Guittone’ and ‘Fra Guittone’ in his own vernacular letters; see L. Leonardi, ‘Guittone nel Laurenziano: struttura del canzoniere e tradizione testuale’, in La filologia romanza e i codici, ed. by S. Guida and F. Latella (Messina: Sicania, 1993), 443–80. 17 Picone notes numerous references to Augustine in Guittone’s letters: see M. Picone, ‘Guittone e i due tempi del “canzoniere” ’, in Picone, ed., Guittone d’Arezzo, pp. 73–88 (pp. 74–5). 18 Holmes, ‘The Construction of Authenticity’, p. 174. 19 Guittone’s amatory canzoni, too, often possess a distinctly anti-courtly charge. See, for example, ‘Ahi Deo, che dolorosa’ (VII). 20 These 110 sonnets have long been recognized as including narrative cycles. Sonnets 87–110 evidently constitute a self-contained ars amandi, but scholars have disagreed as to the number of cycles that may be identified in sonnets 1–86. Following a study by Margueron, they were conventionally divided into four separate sequences (1–18; 19–30;

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‘canzoniere’.21 This sequence charts the travails of a male lover, named as Guittone, who is enamoured with an unnamed donna. In archetypal courtly fashion, his emotions oscillate between unbridled joy (often heralded by the senhal ‘gioia’ [joy]) and histrionic despair (‘noia’ [dismay]). The poet uses a series of sonnets to express a certain emotion, before an extratextual occurrence (described by Leonardi as a ‘stacco’ [break, gap]) changes the direction of the narrative.22 Guittone employs various techniques that allow his sonnets to be read as a continuous series. For example: e fermai me di lei non prender cosa alcuna mai, senza mertarla pria, avendo fort’e ben l’alm’amorosa (19.12–14) [And I resolved never to take anything again from my lady without first deserving it by having a heart steadfastly and truly filled with love.] E poi lo mio penser fu sì fermato certo li feci tutto el convenente (20.1–2) [And since my mind was so resolved I did for her all that was necessary.]

Here, the use of ‘E poi’ and the lexical consistency across the two lyrics (‘fermai’ . . . ‘sì fermato’) suggests that they were always intended to be read in succession. In this sense, as well as in its lack of a prose narrative, the 31–80; 81–6), but Leonardi argues persuasively that all eighty-six were written as a single narrative sequence. See Leonardi, Canzoniere, pp. XXXII–XLII, and ‘Guittone cortese?’, pp. 42–3; C. Margueron, Recherches sur Guittone d’Arezzo: sa vie, son époque, sa culture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), pp. 403–4; M. Pelaez, ‘Review of Le rime di Fra Guittone ed. by F. Pellegrini’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 41 (1903), 354–64; A. Pellizzari, La vita e le opere di Guittone d’Arezzo (Pisa: Nistri, 1906), pp. 37–59; M. Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere, pp. 117–42. 21 I follow Leonardi in using the word ‘canzoniere’ to refer to this sequence of eighty-six sonnets, rather than the entire corpus as presented in the LR9 manuscript. Picone defines the poet’s entire lyric corpus as presented in the Laurentine manuscript as his ‘canzoniere’, while Leonardi differentiates between the retrospective compilation of that manuscript (‘un ordinamento d’autore, a posteriori’ [a retrospective ordering by the author]), and the narrative coherence of the amatory sequence (‘un fatto compositivo, non retrospettivo’ [a compositional, not retrospective, act]): see Picone, ‘Guittone e i due tempi del “canzoniere” ’, pp. 73–88; Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. XI. Giunta defines a ‘canzoniere’ as ‘una raccolta di liriche, per lo più di carattere soggettivo (cioè, nel Medioevo, amoroso), scelte e ordinate dall’autore, in cui il significato dell’insieme, del libro come unità, non sia espresso soltanto dalla somma delle sue componenti ma anche dalla struttura, cioè dall’ordine secondo il quale i vari testi si succedono nel libro’ [a collection of lyrics, for the most part subjective (that is, erotic) in focus, chosen and ordered by the author, in which the meaning of the collection, of the book as a whole, is not expressed only by the sum of its parts but also by its wider structure and the ordering of the various texts within it]: Giunta, Versi a un destinatario, p. 429. 22 Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. XXXIII.

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sequence differs from Dante’s retrospectively compiled Vita nova. Elsewhere, in common with parts of the libello, Guittone’s sonnets are linked by courtly motifs, in an attempt to instil greater variety into what remains a restricted narrative scheme. While they were once seen as a conventional sequence of courtly poems, Leonardi has argued that these sonnets, taken as a collection, have a subversive intent, and aim to highlight the moral tensions that Guittone identified at the heart of the lyric tradition.23 The critic refers closely to d’Arco Silvio Avalle’s essay ‘Il manuale del libertino’ [The libertine’s handbook],24 which explores Guittone’s ars amandi sonnets (87–110 in the Egidi edition), also written before his conversion. Avalle views this group of sonnets as a self-contained ‘manual’, which draws substantially upon Ovid and Capellanus’s De amore in proffering salacious counsel to the consummate courtly lover. Guittone uses these sonnets to present a conflict between love and wisdom—‘voglia’ and ‘savere’ (see 93.5–8)—as fin’amor is parodied and presented as nothing but a ‘commedia degli inganni’ [deceitful farce] operating under a veil of ‘bello parere’ [apparent decency] (92.6).25 For Leonardi, this ars provides the ideological key for reading the eighty-six sonnets of the ‘canzoniere’. He sees the sequence as a ‘descrizione in atto dei procedimenti illustrati nei sonetti dell’ars’ [an acting out of the procedures described in the sonnets of the ars],26 and notes numerous lexical and thematic correspondences between the two sequences.27 Thus, while the structure of the ‘canzoniere’ might suggest an attempt to dignify the love lyric and open it up to new possibilities, as per Dante’s Vita nova, Leonardi argues that it in fact aims to highlight its inherent moral deficiency: the language of fin’amor, removed from its original feudal setting, emerges as a bogus façade of respectability, concealing the ‘carnal voglia’ [carnal desire] (XXV, 21) later denounced by Fra Guittone.28 The collection, according to Leonardi’s

23 Leonardi challenges Moleta’s Early Poetry, which views the sonnet cycles (like Margueron, he views the eighty-six sonnets as four separate cycles, not one single one) as a more sincere attempt to revivify the stale courtly genre. While I follow Leonardi, Moleta’s study nevertheless offers valuable insights. 24 See Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni, pp. 56–86. 25 Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni, p. 83. 26 Leonardi, ‘Guittone cortese?’, p. 441. 27 That is, between sonnets 1–86 and sonnets 87–110. See Leonardi, Canzoniere, pp. XXIII–XXIV. 28 Leonardi’s work on Guittone’s sonnets is extremely persuasive, and my analysis here is indebted to it insofar as I, too, interpret the eighty-six sonnets in an anti-courtly key, and view them as a single ‘canzoniere’. I build upon Leonardi’s work, however, by exploring the relationship of the ‘canzoniere’ to Dante’s Vita nova and the implications of the ideological disjuncture between the two collections.

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reading, thus has a deconstructive and not a reconstructive aim with respect to the love lyric. While we shall see that it identifies similar tensions and limitations with regard to conventional courtly poetry, the reverse is naturally true of Dante’s Vita nova. Dante redefines the love lyric, and proclaims the possibility of a love for Beatrice that flourishes in harmony with ‘lo fedele consiglio della ragione’ [reason’s faithful counsel] (VN II, 9). While this love is formulated in opposition to Guido Cavalcanti’s fatalistic philosophy, Guittone is another important, and often overlooked, point of reference in the work, whose anti-Guittonian agenda is suggested at various junctures. Guittone is attacked most directly in the theoretical digression of chapter XXV. Although he is not named, two passages almost certainly critique him and establish the parameters of the work’s anti-guittonismo. The first of these comes as Dante offers his brief history of the vernacular lyric: E segno che sia picciolo tempo, è che se volemo cercare in lingua d’oco e in quella di sì, noi non troviamo cose dette anzi lo presente tempo per cento e cinquanta anni. E la cagione per che alquanti grossi ebbero fama di sapere dire, è che quasi fuoro li primi che dissero in lingua di sì. E lo primo che cominciò a dire sì come poeta volgare, si mosse però che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere li versi latini. E questo è contra coloro che rimano sopra altra matera che amorosa, con ciò sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore. (VN XXV, 4–6) [And proof that it is but a short time since these vernacular poets first appeared is the fact that if we look into the Provençal and the Italian literature, we shall not find any poems written more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The reason why a few ungifted poets acquired the fame of knowing how to compose is that they were the first who wrote poetry in the Italian language. The first poet to begin writing in the vernacular was moved to do so by a desire to make his words understandable to ladies who found Latin verses difficult to understand. And this is an argument against those who compose in the vernacular on a subject other than love, since composition in the vernacular was from the beginning intended for treating of love.]

Dante claims here that certain second-rate Italian poets (‘alquanti grossi’) have been eulogized simply because they were among the first to compose poetry in the ‘lingua di sì’. He then denounces those (as he does implicitly in Purgatorio XXVI) who decide to write in the vernacular about any topic other than love. The second statement colours the first, with Guittone having enjoyed significant fame on account of his vehemently anti-courtly didactic verse. The numerous deferential sonnets addressed to Guittone, as well as his central place in Duecento manuscripts, serve as evidence of

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this unrivalled lyric celebrity. Later in the chapter, Dante takes aim at Guittone once more, this time on stylistic, rather than thematic, grounds: però che grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento. E questo mio primo amico e io ne sapemo bene di quelli che così rimano stoltamente. (VN XXV, 10) [For, if any one should dress his poem in images and rhetorical colouring and then, being asked to strip his poem of such dress in order to reveal its true meaning, would not be able to do so—this would be a veritable cause for shame. And my best friend and I are well acquainted with some who compose so clumsily.]

As in the ‘nodo’ of Purgatorio XXIV, Dante here attempts to dissociate himself from his pre-‘stilnovist’ forerunners. He condemns those who use a dense and ostentatious style, and who lack the intellectual wherewithal to explain their arcane rhetorical choices. The Vita nova proclaims a contrasting style that rejects the convolution typical of Guittone and his followers in favour of a ‘sweet’ lexis inspired above all by Guinizzelli. The attack on Guittone, surely the foremost among ‘quelli che . . . rimano stoltamente’, is thinly veiled, particularly when viewed alongside the later censures of the De vulgari (‘Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores Guictonem Aretinum . . . extollentes’ [let the devotees of ignorance cease to extol Guittone d’Arezzo and others like him]: DVE II, vi, 8) and Purgatorio XXVI (‘e lascia dir li stolti . . .’ [let the fools go on]: Purg. XXVI, 119). That Dante sides with his ‘primo amico’ [first friend] Cavalcanti makes the principal butt of his censure all the clearer: Guido had attacked Guittone’s intellectual limitations in the sonnet ‘Da più a uno, face un sollegismo’ [A syllogism makes of many one] (XLVII).29 Dante’s opposition to Guittone in the Vita nova is thus bipartite. He desires to break away not only from his predecessor’s hackneyed and often overwrought style, but also his rigid conversionary paradigm and rejection of the ‘matera amorosa’. The Vita nova challenges both of these aspects of Guittone’s work. While the Aretine, on his abandonment of love poetry, affirms the absolute incompatibility of love and reason, the libello proclaims a rational and redeemed brand of love for a woman and describes Dante’s attainment of divine wisdom as realized precisely through his love 29 As numbered in Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, ed. by D. De Robertis (Turin: Einaudi, 1986). Cavalcanti’s poem decries Guittone’s inability to construct a coherent syllogism. On the sonnet’s connection to Dante’s own critique of Guittone in the Commedia, see F. Sberlati, ‘Maestri e amici nel Purgatorio XXVI’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, LXV (2002), 89–132.

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for Beatrice. Stylistically, meanwhile, the Vita nova reflects the evolution of Dante’s poetic voice, moving from the Guittonian poetics of its early chapters to the refined syntax and theological exaltation of its conclusion. The presence of Guittone in the Vita nova is not confined to chapter XXV, as the Aretine poet is also an important intertextual presence in the libello’s early stages, particularly chapters VII–VIII, which undoubtedly bear Guittone’s stylistic stamp. Indeed, two of the three poems they contain—‘O voi che per la via d’Amor passate’ [O you who travel on the road of love] (VN VII, 3–6) and ‘Morte villana di pietà nemica’ [Villainous death, at war with tenderness] (VN VIII, 8–11)—use the ‘double’ sonnet form invented by Guittone, adopted by his followers, but rejected by the so-called ‘stilnovisti’.30 As well as using this archetypally Guittonian form, the Vita nova’s ‘double’ sonnets also contain stylistic flourishes that recall the older poet but are later purged from Dante’s style. The line ‘lo tuo fallar d’onni torto tortoso’ [your guilt of every guilt] (‘Morte villana’, line 9), for instance, has been seen by commentators since Barbi and Maggini as ‘di gusto schiettamente guittoniano’ [of openly Guittonian taste].31 Also conspicuously Guittonian is the line ‘s’io son d’ogni tormento ostale e chiave’ [I am the host and abode of every misery] (‘O voi che per la via’, line 6), which recalls Guittone’s ‘sì com’eo, lasso, ostal d’ogni tormento’ [since I am, alas, abode of every misery] (XIV, line 31).32 The poems are also Guittonian in a broader sense. They deploy the kind of Provençalisms and courtly tropes (such as the introduction of the first screen lady in the closing lines of ‘O voi che per la via’) that feature prominently in Guittone’s love poetry and are later rejected by Dante and his Florentine peers. This courtly conservatism also renders Dante’s early love poetry ideologically redolent of Guittone’s: the lover of these early chapters, like the lover of the ‘canzoniere’, is directed not by reason, but by the appetitive dictates of passion and the specious behavioural code of fin’amor. The presence of these poems is thus more important with respect to the Vita nova’s wider aims than tends to be acknowledged, particularly when 30

The Guittonian style of these poems has been widely noted: see Leonardi, Canzoniere, pp. LVII–LVIII; G. Contini, ‘Review of Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo ed. by F. Egidi’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 117 (1941), 55–82 (pp. 80–2). On Dante’s use of the ‘double’ sonnet, see Foster and Boyde, in Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed., trans., and with a commentary by K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), II, 36. Foster and Boyde note that this form, widespread in the wake of Guittone, is never used by Cavalcanti or Cino da Pistoia. 31 Barbi and Maggini, in Dante Alighieri, Rime della ‘Vita nuova’ e della giovinezza, ed. by M. Barbi and F. Maggini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1956), p. 40. As noted by Barbi and Maggini, the expression ‘d’onni torto tortoso’ recalls various loci in Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’, particularly the references to the donna as ‘gioia gioiosa’ and ‘noia noiosa’. 32 See Barbi and Maggini, p. 32.

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considered in conjunction with the treatment of Guittone in chapter XXV. An important aspect of the Vita nova is of course that it enables Dante to consign certain poems to an appropriate place in its authorized account of his apprenticeship as a love poet. Their Guittonian flavour not only shows that Dante was once influenced by the poet who would become his lyric bête noire, but also that the libello carefully negotiates Guittone’s verse and ideology just as it does Cavalcanti’s in subsequent chapters. Like the Cavalcantian lyrics of the ‘gabbo’ episode in chapters XIV–XVI, the Guittonian lyrics appear, in the wider context of the work, as an aberration and wrong turn, superseded and ‘corrected’ by the poetry that follows. What is crucial—and this is the message of the ‘canzoniere’— is that love for Guittone can only be what we find in the early Vita nova: the language and customs of a remote time and place used to dress up irrational passio. For Guittone, there is but one poetic solution to this profound and inescapable disjuncture between love and rationality: the cloister and its corresponding anti-erotic poetry. Guittone’s unmistakable intertextual presence in the early part of the libello thus confirms his polemical status in the work, his status as a one-time maestro whose poetry and ideology Dante now challenges and deconstructs. The Vita nova and the ‘canzoniere’ pose a fundamental difficulty: how does the poet construct a narrative sequence out of buildings blocks—lyric poems—that are themselves non-narrative? As we saw in Chapter 1, the medieval love lyric effectively forbids both the consummation and the cessation of desire. In an isolated lyric, this is not problematic: the poem is a formal fragment through which the poet articulates, atemporally, the desire of the ‘I’. What complicates matters in a work with narrative aspirations is that the individual poems are not themselves able to communicate significant temporal or dramatic progression. Accordingly, such progression, in both collections, must come from outside the poems. The two writers address this difficulty in different ways. As noted, Guittone uses a series of extratextual events to change the course of his narrative. With the exception of the dialogue form of the two tenzoni (sonnets 37–49 and 81–6), sonnets appear in homogenous cycles, punctuated by ‘stacchi’. Development within these cycles amounts to little more than an increase in ‘intensity’; that is, the antithetical emotions invariably described—‘gioia’ and ‘noia’—simply become more pronounced. The Vita nova’s prose, meanwhile, provides commentary and weaves the selfstanding lyrics into a narrative sequence, sometimes in a manner that exaggerates or distorts the poems’ original significance.33 33 Unlike Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’, the libello was compiled some time after the composition of many of its individual lyrics. Its structure thus allows Dante to present the poems in

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Both works make prominent use of impasse. A ‘stacco’ is introduced in Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ when the possibility of developing a series of sonnets expires. For the narrative to proceed, ‘gioia’ cannot lead to consummation, just as ‘noia’ cannot lead to death or to the abandonment of the beloved. Time and again, when an impasse is reached, Guittone simply flicks a binary switch from ‘noia’ to ‘gioia’—or vice versa—in order to ‘save’ the narrative. Despite its very different means of constructing a lyric-narrative sequence, the Vita nova is also punctuated by moments of impasse, notably in the ‘gabbo’ episode and Dante’s dalliance with the ‘donna gentile’. On both these occasions, love leads to a crisis that Dante, without a radical shift in his psyche, cannot overcome. The presence of impasse in both collections reflects a feature of the love lyric that Dante and Guittone similarly regard as problematic. As seen in the moral verse of Fra Guittone and in Dante’s ‘Doglia mi reca’ and Commedia, the poets are united in their contempt for those who desire for desire’s sake.34 Nowhere is desire more fetishized than in the conventional love lyric, which invariably inhabits the very space of unfulfilment. Poetic worth in that tradition is contingent upon an unsated and indeed insatiable (because worldly) desire. The ethos underpinning the courtly lyric thus constitutes, for both writers, a code of cupiditas that must, in the name of moral rectitude, be reappraised. If the poets’ identification of this problem is shared, however, their proposed solutions are deeply opposed, as can be seen in a comparative reading of the opening thirty sonnets of Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ and Dante’s overcoming of impasse in the ‘gabbo’ episode of the Vita nova. The first thirty sonnets of Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ introduce its principal narrative traits. While the ‘canzoniere’ ultimately offers a subversive critique of courtly values, it begins with the conventional sonnet ‘Amor m’à priso e incarnato tutto’ (1): Amor m’à priso e incarnato tutto, e a lo core di sé fa posanza, e di ciascuno membro tragge frutto, dapoi che priso à tanto di possanza. Doglia, onta, danno àme condutto e del mal meo mi fa ’ver disïanza, e del ben di lei spietata m’è ’n tutto: a manner which fits his ideological agenda. On aspects of this issue, see I. Baldelli, ‘Sul rapporto fra prosa e poesia nella Vita Nuova’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 80 (1976), 325–37; Gragnolati, ‘Rime trasformate e rime assenti’; M. Picone, ‘Strutture poetiche e strutture prosastiche’, MLN, 92 (1977), 117–29. 34 See Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’.

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sì meve e ciascun c’ama à ’n disdegnanza. Spessamente il chiam’e dico: ‘Amore, chi t’à dato di me tal signoraggio, ch’ài conquiso meo senno e meo valore?’ Eo prego che·tti facci meo messaggio e che vadi davante ’l tuo signore e d’esto convenente lo fa’ saggio. [Love has seized me and become incarnate in me; he takes refuge in my heart, and takes hold of each part of my body, such dominion does he have over me. He has led me to pain, shame, and harm; he makes me desire ill for myself and good for her who is cruel in everything she does and who holds me and whoever loves her in disdain. Often I call him and say: ‘Love, who has given you such power over me that you have taken possession of my wisdom and strength?’ I pray that you (the sonnet) understand my message and that you go forth to your lord (Love) and that you make him aware of this quandary.]

In keeping with the topoi of the troubadours and Sicilians, Guittone’s protagonist is physically and emotionally conquered by a tyrannical Love, who leads him to pain, shame, and harm. He is bereft, without wisdom and strength, and wholly at the mercy of a donna who is haughty in all she says and does. Stylistically, the poem is relatively clear, not characterized by the opaque trobar clus often associated with Guittone. It is a sonnet that shares several points of contact with the Vita nova’s opening lyric, ‘A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core’,35 which addresses several of Dante’s fellow poets so that they might help to interpret a vision of Beatrice. Each poem’s incipit speaks of hearts ‘captured’ by personified Love (‘priso e incarnato’/‘presa’), who reigns over the debilitated lover, while an emphasis is similarly placed upon the dispossession of the lover’s heart (Guittone v. 2; Dante vv. 11–12). While the two collections’ ultimate aims are very different, their starting-point—love as a powerful, objectifying, and debilitating force—is very much a common one. In the following sonnets, Guittone describes the lover’s emotional torment before the ‘spietata donna e fera’ [cruel and proud lady] (3.1). She is continually described in terms of her cruelty, yet Love renders him inexorably at her mercy (‘ché fòr m’ài miso di mia possession / e messo in quella de la donna mia’ [for you have taken me out of my own possession, and placed me in that of my lady]: 2.3–4). Of particular interest is sonnet 5, which offers a series of oppositions between the woman’s courtly qualities (‘pro’, cortese, e canoscente’ [worthy, courtly, and wise]: 5.5) and her moral deficiency (‘laida / . . . villana e orgogliosa’ [ugly, wretched and proud]: 5.6, 5.8). For the first time, we gain a sense of Guittone’s 35

See Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. LVII.

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wider polemic in the ‘canzoniere’: the irreconcilability of courtly and moral principles, encapsulated in the description of the donna as ‘bella e fella’ [beautiful and cruel] in line 10: the lady who is ‘bella’ to the man afflicted by love is ‘fella’ to the man of reason. We might contrast this expression with Dante’s description of Beatrice in Inferno II (see Chapter 2) as ‘beata e bella’ [blessed and beautiful], where, by contrast, the courtly connotations of the lady are valorized—fused with, and not at odds with, her moral character. A constant in these opening poems is that the lover is entirely dependent on the donna’s reciprocation of his attention. Without the ‘mercé’ he craves, his love can lead only to death, but with it, all will be resolved: in the donna lie both ‘lo veleno e lo dolcione’ [the poison and the antidote] (8.5). This strongly calls to mind the early chapters of Dante’s Vita nova, where Dante’s gratification is entirely contingent upon his receipt of Beatrice’s greeting—a mode of desire, destined to failure because dependent on a physical and temporal presence that he must surpass. Guittone’s tormented sonnet 10 sees the word ‘mercé’ [mercy] repeated obsessively in a final attempt to win the lady’s compassion (10.1–4). His despair has reached a climax, and the narrative must, by necessity, perform an ungainly volte-face. Accordingly, sonnet 11 offers a fawning ode to the newly merciful donna (‘ben più d’ogni altra pietosa’ [far more merciful than any other]: 11.10), and the subsequent sonnets display a mixture of regret at the lover’s previous censuring of her with ‘dismisura’ [imprudence] (12.3) and a toadying desire to ‘serve’ her. A simplistic polarizing of the lover’s emotions, which lurch from ‘woe to weal’,36 prevails in the opening eighteen sonnets. Sonnet 19 sees another U-turn, as Guittone unveils ‘la falsità e la malafede’ [duplicity and bad faith] of the first eighteen poems.37 It is a crucial poem that should be considered in its entirety: Sì como ciascun, quasi enfingitore, e ora maggiormente assai c’amante, so’ stato ver’ di lei, di beltà fiore; e tanto giuto ei so’ dietro e davante con prego e con mercé e con clamore, faccendo di perfetto amor senbrante, che me promise loco en su’ dolzore, adesso che lei fusse benestante. Eo, pensando la mia gran malvagìa, e la gran fé di lei dolc’e pietosa, sì piansi di pietà, per fede mia; 36

Moleta, Early Poetry, p. 38.

37

Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. 56.

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e fermai me di lei non prender cosa alcuna mai, senza mertarla pria, avendo fort’e ben l’alm’amorosa. [Just as every man now is more like a deceiver than a lover, so I have been towards her, that flower of beauty; and I so harrassed her from every which way with my clamours, pleas, and supplications, seeming to be motivated by perfect love, that she promised me a place in her affections once she was kindly disposed. Thinking about my great deceit and her own sweet and merciful trust, I truly wept tears of regret; and I resolved never to take anything again from my lady without first deserving it by having a heart steadfastly and truly filled with love.]

In its questioning of courtly values and self-accountability, this searching poem is similar in spirit to the likes of ‘Ora parrà’. While Guittone remains within the love lyric, he makes clear his suspicion towards the ethos informing the preceding poems. As noted in Leonardi’s commentary, the key terms in the sonnet, which indicate an important change of emphasis, are the rhyme-words ‘enfingitore’ [deceiver] (19.1) and ‘senbrante’ [seeming] (19.6).38 Both uneasily convey insincerity and deception on the part of the protagonist, and are tellingly appended to Amor (‘amante’ in 19.2; ‘faccendo di perfetto amor senbrante’ in 19.5). ‘Enfingitore’ had previously been used in the Italian lyric only to describe the donna,39 yet here, crucially, it describes the lover, as Guittone interrogates and overturns courtly norms and principles. These two loaded terms represent a turning point in the ‘canzoniere’, a more overt acceptance of the lover’s flawed ideology and bad faith. Line 6 (‘faccendo di perfetto amor senbrante’) makes this explicit: despite the exaltation of the donna in the previous sonnets, his words represented not ‘perfetto amor’, but hollow linguistic artifice. The condemnation of the courtly ethos continues across the six subsequent lyrics (20–5). These reflect upon the nature of ‘true’ love and express the lover’s regret at his past wrongdoings (‘sì com’ e’ disleale erali stato’ [just I had been disloyal to her]: 20.3; ‘reconnoscente foi del meo peccato’ [I was cognizant of my own wrongdoing]: 20.5). While the courtly ethos has been undermined, the lover pledges once more to love his donna, only now in a more worthy fashion. Sonnet 21 presents us with a series of antitheses between his old, faulty love and a new love based 38 Of ‘senbrante’, Leonardi states: ‘Vero termine-chiave è però senbrante, usato nella sua connotazione più negativa e da qui in poi ripetuto nel canzoniere sempre a sottolineare l’inganno, la falsità dell’uno o dell’altro personaggio’ [‘Senbrante’ is a real keyword, used in its most negative sense and henceforth repeated in the ‘canzoniere’ in order to underline the deceit and duplicity of one character or the other]: Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. 56. 39 See Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. 57.

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upon ‘core’ [heart] (21.3), ‘alma’ [soul] (21.6), and ‘savere’ [wisdom] (21.5). Having proclaimed the rectitude of his new stance, however, the lover is faced with a further problem, as the poet enters into ‘a dizzying spiral of ironic self-consciousness’:40 rather than being ‘possessed’ by love, the lover now struggles to find it. Crucially, he claims that he must rediscover love in order to revivify his poetry, which, without it, is worthless. Love, harmful for others, would accordingly act as his ‘medicine’: ‘Ché la cosa c’altrui par venen sia / è sola medicina al meo dolore’ [For what would be poison for others is the only possible cure to my pain] (24.3–4). Even at this early stage, prior to his conversion and espousal of moral themes, Guittone is acutely aware of the moral and poetic tensions surrounding the powerful association of love and poetic worth in the vernacular lyric tradition. Crucial in this regard is sonnet 25, whose opening lines reflect upon precisely this question: Ben saccio de vertà che ’l meo trovare val poco, e à ragion de men valere, poi ch’eo non posso in quel loco intrare ch’adorna l’om de gioia e de savere. (25.1–4)41 [I am fully aware that my poetry is of little worth, and should be worth even less, for I cannot enter into that place which adorns us with joy and wisdom.]

For as long as the courtly poet is without love, the supposed conduit to joy and wisdom, his poetry (trovare) is ‘val poco’.42 As discussed in Part I, vernacular lyric authority is conventionally inseparable from the experience of Amor. This bond will later be severed by Fra Guittone, who, in very similar terms, proclaims the validity of poetry that does not concern the wanton desire of human love: Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare e s’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio poi che del tutto Amor fugh’e disvoglio, e più che cosa mai forte mi spare. (XXV, 1–4) [Now it will become apparent if I shall know how to sing, and if I am worth as a poet what I was formerly worth, now that I completely flee Love and ‘diswant’ it, and find it more terrible than any other thing.]

40

Holmes, ‘The Construction of Authenticity’, p. 192. The ‘loco’ here in all likelihood has sexual connotations. On the powerful association of the terms amar and trobar in troubadour poetry see the opening chapter (‘Amar/Trobar: The Vocabulary of Love and Poetics’) of A. E. Van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in the Troubadour Lyric (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 17–25. 41 42

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Not only does the canzone ‘Ora parrà’ rebut the courtly notion that worthy poetry depends upon erotic experience, it also explicitly dissociates love and wisdom (‘ché ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore / regge follore— in loco di savere’ [for wherever Love rules, madness reigns instead of wisdom]: XXV, 10–11), which, in sonnet 25 above, are associated in very similar terms (‘quel loco . . . ch’adorna l’om de gioia e de savere’). Guittone’s attempts to reconcile love and ‘savere’ have led only to impasse, since love poetry inevitably germinates from and depends upon an irrational and insatiable form of desire. To overcome this impasse, the lover requests the assistance of a third party: per ch’eo rechiamo e chero lo savere di ciascun om ch’è prode e canoscente a l’aiuto del meo grande spiacere. (25.12–14) [so I ask for the advice of one who is worthy and wise, who might rescue me from my great sorrow.]

These lines anticipate the intervention of the character Mastro Bandino in sonnets 28–30. The language employed in 25.13, however, spells trouble to the attentive reader. Having used the previous seven sonnets to recant his subscription to courtly values and to proclaim a new and better way of loving, the lover now turns back towards the very ethos and language he had professed to leave behind. By seeking the intervention of one who is ‘prode e canoscente’ [worthy and wise] (25.13), Guittone evokes the canonical courtly virtues that, as Leonardi notes, were at the core of his earlier poetry (‘donna pro’, cortese e canoscente’ [a lady worthy, courteous, and wise]: 5.5).43 The exchange of sonnets with Mastro Bandino points not to a ‘solution’ to the lover’s impasse, but to a step backwards, as he re-embraces the ideology he recently recognized as faulty. Mastro Bandino’s ‘savere’ is, for Guittone-poeta, anti-wisdom. He lays down a series of hackneyed rules, echoing Capellanus’s De amore and Guittone’s own ars, which he claims will lead the protagonist to love once more, but which will, in reality, lead only to the same sort of impasse. And so, while the ensuing sonnets mark a ‘fresh start’ and the beginning of a new cycle (‘Tuttor ch’eo dirò “Gioia”, gioiva cosa’ [Every time I say ‘Joy’, joyous creature] heralds this new series of six ‘gioia’ sonnets and points to the unthinking adulation of sonnets 11–18), the narrative now proceeds in the shadow of the lover’s ‘malfede’.

43 ‘The initial subtlety of self-perception which marked the second experiment [sonnets 19–30] as an advance over the first [1–18] founders in a trough of conventional despair’: Moleta, Early Poetry, p. 51.

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This opening cycle thus begins to illuminate Guittone’s attitude towards earthly love and love poetry. When the protagonist employs reason and prudence, the kind of love he seeks cannot flourish, and he must revert to the courtly values, those of the ‘enfingitore’ [deceiver], that he had only recently renounced. ‘Savere’ impedes ‘amore’ and consequently causes the love lyric to falter—for it depends on the experience of love. There is, in short, no scope for a rational brand of love poetry. Particularly interesting is the opposition between sonnet 25 and ‘Ora parrà’—poems similarly concerned with the association of poetic worth and the experience of love, which is the crux of the lyric tradition’s highly compromised moral status. In the wider context of Guittone’s corpus, the lover of the ‘canzoniere’ emerges as an exemplar of the form of illusory desire that Fra Guittone will so vehemently condemn—a negative model to be glossed by the poet’s didactic verse. Just as Guittone reflects upon his early sonnets with the confession that he has been an ‘enfingitore’ and vows to find a more respectable way of loving, an impasse similarly prompts Dante to adopt a ‘matera nuova e più nobile che la passata’ [a new theme, nobler than the last] (VN XVII, 1). It is in the manner of their responses to the moral and intellectual difficulties posed by love poetry, however, that we begin to observe the poets’ philosophical divergence. The opening chapters of the Vita nova describe Dante’s first encounters with Beatrice and the effects of her beauty and ‘lo suo dolcissimo salutare’ [her most sweet greeting] (VN X, 2). They represent something of a contradiction: while the prose at the beginning of the work endorses a rational ideal of love, and while her greeting is described as instilling charity and humility (VN XI), Dante’s experience of Beatrice predominantly leads him to anguish. This is most acute in chapters XIV–XVI, as Dante describes how Beatrice and her friends joke at his expense (‘e ragionando si gabbavano di me con questa genilissima’ [they began to talk and joke about me with that most gracious one]: VN XIV, 7) after he becomes physically debilitated by her presence at a wedding feast. He retreats to his room (‘la camera de le lagrime’ [the room of tears]: VN XIV, 9) and becomes embroiled in embittered internal emotions. The ensuing sonnets are very different from the Guittonian poems of chapters VII–VIII. Dante is no longer trapped by the customs of fin’amor. Instead, his frustration is articulated in poems whose bleak introspection and psychological drama clearly recall Cavalcanti.44 44 The Cavalcantian nature of these chapters has been widely noted: see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 136–9; De Robertis, Il libro della ‘Vita Nuova’, pp. 71–85; Foster-Boyde, II, 71–95; Malato, ‘Amor cortese e amor cristiano’, pp. 181–7.

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In the sonnet ‘Con l’altre donne mia vista gabbate’ [You join with the other ladies to make sport of the way I look] (VN XIV, 11–12), Dante reproaches Beatrice for failing to show him pity when seeing him in a state of distress. In unmistakably Cavalcantian fashion, he describes the malfunction of his vital spirits, whose circulation was believed to ensure the healthy functioning of the body.45 Love ‘assails’ Dante’s faculties, and, with the mention of ‘ancide’ [kills] in line 10, is explicitly linked to death.46 This Cavalcantian mode characterizes the prose as well as the poetry. In the following chapter, Dante describes a dialogue between conflicting thoughts that conveys the fragmentation of his selfhood, and continues to deploy verbs of violence and disruption (‘uccidere’ [kill], ‘distruggere’ [destroy]). As in the poetry of Guido, there is a stark and tragic disjunction between the lady’s ‘mirabile bellezza’ [miraculous beauty] (XV, 2) and the lover’s ability to respond to this beauty in a productive or transcendent fashion. These emotions intensify in the next sonnet, ‘Ciò che m’incontra, ne la mente more’ [Whatever might restrain me, dies in my mind] (VN XV, 4–6), where ‘amor’ and ‘morte’ are associated ever more closely. This is seen particularly in the sestet, where each line of the final tercet ends with an image of death: Peccato face chi allora mi vide, se l’alma sbigottita non conforta, sol dimostrando che di me li doglia, per la pietà, che ’l vostro gabbo ancide, la qual si cria ne la vista morta de li occhi, c’hanno di lor morte voglia. (VN XV, 6) [He sins who witnesses my transformation and will not comfort my tormented soul, at least by showing that he shares my grief for pity’s sake—which by your mocking dies, once it is brought to life by my dying face, whose yearning eyes beg death to take me now.]

Dante is at this point in a psychological and poetic crisis that reaches its culmination in the final ‘Cavalcantian’ sonnet, ‘Spesse fiate vegnonmi a la mente’ [Time and again the thought comes to me mind] (VN XVI, 7–10). This poem interrogates ‘le oscure qualità ch’Amor mi dona’ [the dark condition Love imparts to me] (v. 2). Death looms once again (‘ch’Amor m’assale subitanamente / sì che la vita quasi m’abbandona’ [for Love’s attack is so precipitous that life itself all but abandons me]: lines 5–6) as 45 On the spirits in the poetry of Cavalcanti, see H. Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 74–8. 46 The association of love and death is, of course, a key feature of Cavalcanti’s love poetry: ‘Donna me prega’ claims that, from Amore, ‘segue spesso morte’ [death often follows] (line 35).

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Dante is pale and unable to offer any resistance (‘e così smorto, d’onne valor voto / vegno a vedervi, credendo guerire’ [and deathly languid, drained of all defenses, I come to you expecting to be healed]: lines 10–11) to the violent debilitation of his mental and corporeal faculties. Before the strategic reordering of the Vita nova, this fraught and claustrophobic sequence did, indeed, culminate with death in what Barolini terms the ‘hyper-Cavalcantian alchemy’ of the canzone ‘Lo doloroso amor’ [The sorrowful love],47 unsurprisingly omitted from the Vita nova, whose first stanza famously concludes with the words, ‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice’ [I die thanks to her whose name is Beatrice]. Dante has at this stage reached an incapacitating psychological impasse. He is imprisoned by a Cavalcantian understanding of love and his own death seems inevitable. He is in an analogous position to Guittone’s protagonist in sonnet 10 of the ‘canzoniere’, who similarly desires his own demise. Dante’s response to his own lyric impasse is, however, altogether different from Guittone’s, and in it we witness the first decisive proclamation of the libello’s departure from a Guittonian and Cavalcantian perspective. Following the ‘gabbo’ episode Dante states his need to adopt a new, worthier ‘matera’.48 He recants the self-absorbed poetics of the previous chapters and opts instead to foreground his own ‘disinterested’ words of praise for her (‘quelle parole che lodano la donna mia’ [those words that praise my lady]: VN XVIII, 6), which celebrate the unfailing divine goodness she embodies (‘quello che non mi puote venire meno’ [that which will not fail me]: XVIII, 4): a poetics no longer concerned with the gratification of the self but the veneration of the other. Dante’s pledge to reassess his approach as a love poet is, in itself, unremarkable. Guittone does the very same thing when he recognizes the self-deception that had riddled the opening sonnets of the ‘canzoniere’. Yet where Guittone schemes, wishing to draw attention to his protagonist’s mistakes before allowing them to be repeated wholesale, Dante introduces his new ‘matera’ with great solemnity and stages a decisive break from the preceding lyrics. He hesitates ahead of penning a new poem upon his lofty new theme, troubled by a ‘paura di cominciare’ [fear of beginning] (VN XVIII, 9), before describing a vital breakthrough in his creative process:

47

Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, p. 86. On aspects of the ‘matera nuova’ and ‘Donne ch’avete’, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 40–57; De Robertis, Il libro della ‘Vita Nuova’, pp. 86–156; R. M. Durling and R. L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘Rime Petrose’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 53–70; Harrison, pp. 31–46; Lombardi, Wings, pp. 128–9; Singleton, Essay, pp. 78–109; Steinberg, pp. 61–94. 48

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Allora dico che la mia lingua parlò quasi come per sé stessa mossa, e disse: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. Queste parole io ripuosi ne la mente con grande letizia, pensando di prenderle per mio cominciamento. (VN XIX, 2–3) [Then I must tell you, my tongue, as if moved of its own accord, spoke and said: ‘Ladies who have intelligence of love’. With great delight I decided to keep these words in mind and to use them as the beginning of my poem.]

The canzone ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ is of course granted preeminence not only in the libello, but also in the De vulgari and the Commedia.49 As Dante will suggest with regard to the poem in Purgatorio XXIV, it taps into a profound, perhaps divine,50 creative source and is unmediated and spontaneous in its verbal expression. Dante’s poetry, he tells us, no longer regurgitates tropes inherited from his lyric precursors, but faithfully articulates his inner promptings. As suggested by the prose that precedes it, the canzone itself ‘strikes a fresh note’,51 following the Guittonian and Cavalcantian poetics of the opening chapters, and heralds the arrival of the ‘stilo de la loda’ [praise style] (VN XXVI, 4). In stark contrast with the lethal Amor of the preceding lyrics, love here emerges as a source of spiritual betterment. The canzone’s lofty praise of Beatrice shares characteristics with Guinizzelli’s ‘donna angelicata’, but takes the Bolognese’s celestial imagery beyond metaphor to make unprecedented claims for its subject.52 The juxtaposition of the terms ‘intelletto’ and ‘amore’ in the incipit points immediately to the poem’s wider attempts to harmonize love and intellection, while in lines 5–8 he underscores how his love derives principally not from Beatrice’s carnal beauty but rather from her moral distinction. The second stanza introduces the splendour of Dante’s new ‘matera’, as the psychosis of the preceding episode is replaced by serene exaltation. Dante describes how Beatrice’s earthly glory shines as far as Heaven (16–18); how Heaven’s only defect is her absence (19–20); how every saint there awaits her (21). No longer a conventional ‘madonna’, Beatrice now embodies celestial grace and moral perfection, and in praising her, Dante’s words at once exalt her Creator. The canzone proceeds in this vein, 49 The canzone is cited twice in the treatise (DVE II, viii, 8 and II, xii, 3) and is of course described as inaugurating the ‘nove rime’ in Purg. XXIV, 49–51. 50 Gorni (pp. 17–18) notes Dante’s allusion to Psalm 29 in these lines, as Dante crucially establishes a spiritual foundation for his love poetry. 51 Foster-Boyde, II, 95. 52 Cherchi discusses differences between Guinizzelli’s poetry for the ‘donna angelicata’, which retains a selfish dimension, and Dante’s ‘stilo de la loda’: see P. Cherchi, ‘Dante e i trovatori’, in Le culture di Dante: Studi in onore di R. Hollander: Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. by M. Picone, T. J. Cachey Jr, and M. Mesirca (Florence: Cesati, 2003), pp. 93–103 (pp. 97–100).

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describing in turn her salvific grace (‘Ancor l’ha Dio per maggior grazia dato / che non pò mal finir chi l’ha parlato’ [God has graced her with an even greater gift: whoever speaks with her shall speak with Him]: 41–2) and her bodily perfection (‘Color di perle ha quasi, in forma quale / convene a donna aver, non for misura: / ella è quanto de ben pò far Natura; / per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova’ [Her colour is the pallor of the pearl, a paleness perfect for a gracious lady; she is the best that Nature can achieve and by her mould all beauty tests itself]: 47–50), as human and divine love are radically fused—in contrast with the disquieting tension inherent in Guittone’s donna (‘bella e fella’), who seems to embody the mendacity inherent in corporeal beauty. ‘Donne ch’avete’ marks the arrival of Dante’s ‘nove rime’ and functions as the poetic centrepiece of the Vita nova. By intentionally placing the canzone immediately after the despair of the preceding chapters, Dante deliberately presents it as the solution to his Cavalcantian impasse—a watershed that informs the remainder of the Vita nova and beyond. The crisis of the ‘gabbo’ episode remained a crisis only for as long as Dante subscribed to the Cavalcantian principles that guided that sequence. For Guittone, by contrast, the impasse appears terminal. His first thirty-six sonnets are characterized by a series of about-turns. While sonnets 19–25 appeared to signal the birth of a new ideology, addressing the moral problems of the previous poems, the lover ultimately moves full-circle: his rational critique of courtly values proves irreconcilable with the desire upon which lyric poetry is predicated, and he returns, witlessly, to a conventional courtly mode. The poet carries out this process quite deliberately, seeking to emphasize the rational incapacity of the courtly genre. Where Guittone’s narrative moves in a circle, Dante’s has an unmistakable upward trajectory. Trapped by a defective ideological model in his Cavalcantian section, Dante uses the prosimetrum to present the ‘stilo de la loda’ as a solution to this courtly crisis. Accordingly, Dante and Guittone use impasse to very different ends. Guittone uses it to affirm that the ideological limitations of the love lyric are insurmountable; that an attempt to reconcile love and reason will prove incompatible with the irrevocable principles of the tradition. Dante, by contrast, uses impasse to underline what is radical about his venture. He shows how the conventional limitations of the lyric tradition are, in his writing, overcome, how lyric desire is radically reformulated. Dante’s tendency to chart the successes of his own poetry in terms of the inadequacies of his forerunners is usually associated with the Commedia, but is also a crucial feature of the Vita nova. Impasse acts as the yardstick against which Dante maps the progress of his poetry against the perceived limitations of his precursors—not a marker of limitation, but a stimulus

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for elevation. The step that Dante takes from the seeming dead-end of ‘Spesse fiate’ to the ‘matera nuova’ of ‘Donne ch’avete’ is that which allows him to enter, as a love poet, into the realm of the rational and the spiritual—the very step that Guittone and Cavalcanti claimed could not be taken. Thus, Dante transcends, for the first time, the obdurate dualism to which in different ways his chief ideological adversaries subscribed. While Dante and Guittone’s handling of impasse reflected their different attitudes towards the moral and ideological parameters of the love lyric, the later stages of the two collections are illuminating in their respective attempts to redefine love poetry and afford to it a new significance. At the heart of Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ are two exchanges between the lover and donna, which play a crucial role in the poet’s critique of the courtly ethos. Following the lover’s re-espousal of courtly norms in sonnet 31, and a series of sonnets that describe his insatiable desire, he seeks to arrange a meeting with the donna. Having overcome the further obstacle of fearing to speak before her, the subject of sonnets 34 to 36, his wish for a meeting is granted. Their encounter is described in the first of the two tenzoni, in which the lover and donna trade increasingly fraught sonnets. After the lover declares his love in sonnet 37, the donna requests that he prove himself ‘com’om leale e saggio’ [as a loyal and wise man] (38.12). In the ensuing sonnets, he implores her, with seemingly illicit motives, to meet him in a ‘loco nascoso’ [hidden place] (42.9). The lady, however, rebuffs the lover’s every advance, and any sense of his moral credibility is gradually stripped away until they eventually part (sonnet 49). Moleta describes the tenzone as ‘a minor masterpiece of split-level argument, sustained irony, and of the poet’s ability to play each attitude against the other to the full. . . . Literature, in the person of the lover, meets reality head-on, in the person of the lady’.53 For Moleta, then, the donna’s sonnets represent Guittone the poet’s sense of self-interrogation and pragmatism towards the courtly tradition, while the lover’s represent the courtly idealism, to which, in Moleta’s view, the poet retains a certain loyalty. These contrasting attitudes are reflected in the language of the two characters: hers is ‘crisp and argumentative’ (‘anzi se’ falso amante e ’nfingitore’ [instead you are a false lover and deceiver]: 44.3–4); his, ‘oblique and formulaic’ (‘Lo dolor e la gioi del meo coraggio / non vo poria, bona donna, contare’ [The love and the joy in my heart could not, my lady, be explained]: 41.1–2).54 The tenzone thus acts as a mechanism through which Guittone gradually unveils the moral and ideological failings of the lover. In time, his 53

Moleta, Early Poetry, pp. 62–3.

54

Moleta, Early Poetry, p. 62.

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motives are exposed as purely carnal, as the donna explodes his pretensions of courtly respectability: Ma, se dimandi alcun loco nascoso, prov’è che la ragion tua no è bella; per che né mo’ né mai dar non te l’oso. (42.9–11) [But, if you invite me to a hidden place, it is proof that your motivations are not sound; I have no intention of granting your wish now or in the future.]

Having returned to stock courtly emotions following the more searching sonnets 19–25, the tenzone expresses the inevitable failure of the courtly protagonist. His love has remained that of an ‘enfingitore’ [deceiver], and the donna ruthlessly exposes his suspect motives and spurious language. The key verb ‘senbrare’ [seem] appears twice in sonnet 49 (lines 2 and 13), as the departing lover cuts a forlorn figure. It posits a gap between appearance and reality and points to the lover’s self-deception, particularly in line 13, where he states his hope that another woman might consider him ‘fin com’eo senbro’ [worthy as I might seem].55 Not only does this call into question the integrity of the lover himself, but, in linking ‘senbrare’ to the key term ‘fin’, explicitly casts doubt upon the tradition of fin’amor he embodies. In seeking another donna, instead of abandoning the courtly values that have hitherto led him only to despair, the lover’s slide into further anguish appears inevitable, and the following sonnets chart his burgeoning despair. The donna, whom he once praised so effusively, becomes in sonnet 51 a paragon of ‘villania’, of everything un-courtly. This sonnet marks the arrival of the ‘noia’ topos that dominates the ensuing sonnets. The lover no longer has any justification in calling his lady ‘gioia’, and declares ‘noia’ to be a more fitting epithet for her, since she is ‘noiosa’ in everything she says and does. Though her beauty is unquestionable (she is likened to Helen of Troy in lines 7–8 of sonnet 51), she is not an ‘angel di Deo senbrante’ [like one of God’s angels] (49.11) but ‘villana’ [wretched] and ‘croia’ [base], undermining the ‘angelification’ of the beloved we witness elsewhere in medieval lyric. We might contrast Guittone’s demystification here with Dante’s solemn, Homeric description of Beatrice at the beginning of the Vita nova: ‘Ella non parea figliuola d’uomo, ma di Deo’ [She seemed not a daughter of mankind, but of God] (VN II, 8). In sonnet 58, death seems the only possible outcome for Guittone’s despairing protagonist: Poi morir deggio, dirò che m’amorta quella c’onore e valor e piacere 55

On this key phrase, see Borra, pp. 57–8; Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. 146.

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e beltate sovre tutt’altre porta e crudeltate e fierezza e volere de darmi morte: sì che non m’apporta amor servire né pietà cherere. (58.9–14) [Since die I must, I will say that my killer has honour, worth, and beauty above all others, as well as cruelty and pride and a desire to bring me to death, so that my loyalty and compassion bring me no love in return.]

Once more, the donna’s beauty (lines 9–11) is juxtaposed with her cruelty (lines 12–13), harking back to the ‘bella e fella’ description of sonnet 5. The lover shows himself to be nothing but the plaything of passion, courtly convention, and the lady herself: facing death, only her intervention in the following sonnet can save him. Between the intercession of the donna in sonnet 59 and the start of the second tenzone in sonnet 80 comes a series of twenty-one sonnets in which Guittone strives to reinvigorate his narrative experiment. The donna’s reluctant intervention predictably provokes fresh euphoria in the lover (sonnet 60 begins ‘Gioia d’onne gioioso movimento’ [Joy of every joyful movement]) and lends the ‘canzoniere’ fresh impetus to proceed. Following a triad of celebratory sonnets (60–2), which altogether recant the despair and vilification of 50–8, Guittone introduces a series of stock courtly motifs, which gradually cause the reconciliation reached in 59 to break down once more. He introduces ‘lausengiers’ (rival ‘false’ lovers, in sonnets 63–9), screen ladies (63–71), hierarchical disparity (70), and distance (72–6), in order to provide greater narrative diversity. The protagonist undergoes several fluctuations in his emotional state in these sonnets, once more bringing him to the brink of death (‘m’àn ormai vita quasi tolluta’ [they have now almost taken my life away]: 73.8), before the donna again takes pity upon him. We eventually reach three more exultant sonnets (77–9), which employ a virtuoso trobar clus, before a decisive lapse into despair—the lover presented with the choice of death or madness: ‘per che morire, oimè lasso, m’agrata / che·ss’eo più viv’ormai, matto divegno’ [because death, alas, is pleasing to me, for if I live any longer, I will go mad] (80.7–8). Although the first tenzone confirmed the donna’s distrust of the lover, she has until now taken pity upon him when the need has arisen. That is, while Guittone-poeta has undermined the ethos of his protagonist, he has tempered his censure, which has largely taken the form of subtle chiding. This changes dramatically in the tenzone that concludes the ‘canzoniere’. Following the lady’s decisive rejection of his love, the protagonist unleashes a bitter tirade against the donna, as he rips off the façade of cortesia to reveal the ugly truth of his intentions. We see a profound stylistic shift: the

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honorific ‘voi’ with which the lover had previously addressed her is replaced by an insolent ‘tu’, as courtly refinement makes way for startling acridity: Villana donna, non mi ti disdire, volendomi sprovar fin amadore: ch’eo fin non son, ver s’ò talento dire, néd essere vorrea, tant’ai ladore. Ca, per averti a tutto meo desire, non t’ameria un giorno per amore; ma chesta t’ò volendoti covrire, ché più volere terriami disnore. Ché tu se’ laida ’n senblanti e villana, e croia ’n dir e ’n far tutta stagione, e·sse’ leggiadra ed altizzosa e strana, ché ’n te noiosa noia è per ragione, donna laida, che·llegiadra se’ e vana e croia, ch’è’ d’altera oppinïone. (81) [Wretched lady, do not challenge my desire to prove myself a courtly lover: for I want to tell you that I am not courtly at all, nor do I wish to be, such is your ugliness. For even if you submitted to my love, I would not love you for even one day; I have asked you only wanting to straddle you, for desiring more than that would have brought me only shame. For you are ugly in your appearance and base in your every word and deed; you are capricious, haughty and strange. You, ugly woman, are tedious, fickle, vain, base and self-important.]

Cortesia is here exposed as a meaningless charade. Not only does the lover reveal his antipathy towards the donna, spewing forth a series of pejorative terms, but he reveals that beneath his linguistic artifice has lain a purely sexual motive (‘ma chesta t’ò volendoti covrire’), as the poet seeks to condemn categorically the ugly and immoral desire that he identifies beneath the bluster of courtly language. While the foundations of the lover’s ideological edifice have appeared precarious throughout the ‘canzoniere’, the rapidity and starkness of its ultimate collapse is devastating, as the poet finally unleashes his wrath upon the values that he has gradually undermined. Having been stripped of her own aura in sonnet 81, the donna then takes aim at the lover’s putative fin’amor: Or come crederia che ’n te valore di fine amant’e amor fusse giamai? C’ogn’altra fina cosa è di te fòr, e lo incontra per te regna assai. (82.3–6) [How could I now believe that the virtues of a courtly lover were ever present in you? For you lack every courtly virtue, and possess its very opposite.]

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Far from being an embodiment of ‘valore’, the donna sardonically casts the lover as the embodiment of all things base. While the first tenzone retained a sense of cortesia, the second is nothing but a slanging match: the two trade blows to unveil the essence of the other’s deception, as the construction of the first eighty sonnets is obliterated: Se vuoi ch’i’ dica ’l ver, sì com’e’ ’l saccia, perché disditta se’, diraggiol bene: ché tu, pensando c’ài laida la faccia e·sse’ croi e villana, allor te tene paura forte che gabbo non faccia; perciò disdici, e far ciò ti convene. (83.9–14) [If you want me to tell the truth as I understand it, since you have refused me, I will tell you willingly: for you, knowing that you are indeed ugly in appearance and vulgar and wretched, are scared now I am no longer playing the game; it is for this reason you refuse me as you do.]

These lines crucially describe how the lover, now that he does not partake in a ‘gabbo’, may describe the donna in the terms he now uses. Leonardi views ‘gabbo’ as ‘la parola definitoria di tutta questa vicenda’ [the defining term of the entire affair],56 exposing as a charade the convoluted ritual that preceded this encounter and exploding the courtly ethos in unquestionable terms. The lover’s last sonnet (85) expresses scorn and finality. As well as making further reference to the courtly ‘game’, this time through the term ‘gioco’ (‘E’ veggio che del gioco non ài par te’ [I see you are no longer part of the game]: 85.4), he continues and intensifies the abuse of the previous sonnets, speaking with malice and even wishing death upon the donna in the embittered sestet (‘Che Dio male ti dia, come se’ degna / e tollati la vita’ [May God curse you as you deserve, and take away your life]: 85.9–10). In the second quatrain, he describes a final, insurmountable impasse (‘Però parto vinciuto; e sì m’agrata’ [So I depart, vanquished, and it is pleasing to me]: 85.5). He, the embodiment of courtly delusion, has been defeated in this lengthy ‘gioco’ by the hard-headed moral realism of the donna. And it is she, fittingly, who has the final word. The final tercet draws a definitive line under both the tenzone and the entire sequence, as the possibility of further dialogue is unequivocally discounted: Ben puoi tener ormai la lingu’acorta e dir ciò che ti piac’e star fidato, che ’nn-alcun modo non responderaggio. (86) 56

Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. 250.

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[Whether you keep your mouth shut or say what you wish or remain loyal—there is no way I will respond to you.]

Further dialogue will be fruitless; the lady would indeed rather die as the lover would wish, she states, than be with one such as him (9–11). What the first eighty sonnets of Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ sought to convey implicitly—the faultiness and deceit of the courtly ethos—is now conveyed explicitly, as Guittone’s brutal demystification of the courtly ethos ends with an emphatic ‘full stop’. While Guittone ultimately aims to redefine courtly love as lust, Dante in the Vita nova seeks to ascribe to love poetry a new significance and moral viability. Accordingly, the later chapters of the libello strive to take the love lyric somewhere new and unimagined, to collapse the same barriers that Guittone sought to re-impose. The chapters following ‘Donne ch’avete’ carry on where that canzone left off, solidifying the Beatrice’s salvific and Christological function and underlining the edifying effects of Dante’s love for her, now freed from the selfishness of its earlier guises. We might expect Beatrice’s death to constitute a definitive impasse in Dante’s growth as a love poet; instead, as seen in the canzone of bereavement ‘Li occhi dolenti’ [The eyes grieving] (VN XXXI, 8–17), her death and ascension into Heaven serve to raise Dante’s poetry for his ‘gentilissima’ to a higher level still.57 As Elena Lombardi puts it, Beatrice’s death ‘allows for the stretching of desire-as-praise in a supernal direction, and for the completion and termination of desire/praise in a different eschatological dimension’.58 While its content is naturally more solemn, ‘Li occhi dolenti’ is closely linked, structurally and thematically, to the earlier ‘praise’ canzone ‘Donne ch’avete’.59 An important bridge between these poems comes in the canzone ‘Donna pietosa e di novella etate’ [A lady compassionate and of tender years] (VN XXIII, 17–28), which recounts a painful, prophetic vision of Beatrice’s death. In ‘Donna pietosa’, Dante faces up to the impasse of death so that when it arrives he can interpret it as something other than the definitive obstacle it once appeared to represent. Although the pain of mourning in ‘Li occhi dolenti’ at times points to Dante’s demise (‘lo dolore, / che a poco a poco a la morte mi mena’ [that grief, which gradually leads me to death]: lines 4–5), as it had in ‘Donna pietosa’, it is now the exaltation of Beatrice that prevails. Dante 57 See Singleton, Essay, esp. pp. 78–115; C. Vecce, ‘ “Ella era uno nove, cioè un miracolo” (V.N. XXIX, 3): il numero di Beatrice’, in Moleta, ed., La gloriosa donna de la mente, pp. 161–80. 58 Lombardi, Wings, p. 129. 59 There are numerous links between the two canzoni. See Foster-Boyde, II, 132–8; De Robertis, Il libro della ‘Vita Nuova’, pp. 193–4.

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has learned not to wallow in despair (as Guittone’s protagonist had), but to comprehend death (and desire) sub specie aeternitatis. Accordingly, pain segues into celebration. The second stanza of ‘Li occhi dolenti’ fulfils the promise of the second stanza of ‘Donne ch’avete’: where once Heaven’s only defect was Beatrice’s absence, she is now situated in the Empyrean (‘Ita n’è Beatrice in l’alto cielo, / nel reame ove li angeli hanno pace’ [Beatrice has gone home to the highest heaven, into the peaceful realm where angels live]: lines 15–16). Her death becomes a testament to her virtue (‘no la ci tolse qualità di gelo / né di calore, come l’altre face, / ma solo fue sua gran benignitate’ [No quality of heat or cold took her away from us, as is the fate of others, rather it was her great unselfishness alone]: lines 18–20), as God, believing her too worthy for ‘esta vita noiosa’ [this wretched life] (line 27), summons her to His side. While ‘Li occhi dolenti’ remains a poem of no little pain, Dante nevertheless offers a positive solution to his predicament, and, even in the most desperate circumstances, presents love poetry as a vehicle for judicious reflection and moral catharsis. Like ‘Donne ch’avete’, the bereavement canzone uses poetry to cleanse the poet’s emotional state: just as the earlier ‘praise’ canzone spoke of the need to ‘isfogar la mente’ [relieve the burden on my mind] (line 4), ‘Li occhi dolenti’ strives to ‘sfogar lo dolore’ [vent that grief] (line 4). He presents his love poetry as a means of engaging, not alienating, his intellect; grief is presented not as self-indulgent, but a manifestation of his departed lady’s unique moral distinction. Death in the Vita nova is not, therefore, the definitive impasse we might expect. Rather, Dante uses this event to show, once more, what is uniquely successful about his own love poetry and its capacity to overcome the kind of impasse that confines other lyric poets. In this case, Dante invites us to consider the rectitude of his response to death and the reconstitution of his desire, not only in comparison with the more fraught ‘Donna pietosa’ but also the response of his former (Guittonian) self in the derivative courtly planctus ‘Morte villana’. Moreover, his capacity to love Beatrice beyond the grave sees him surpass Guinizzelli: the ‘saggio’ [wise man] (VN XX, III) whose own love poetry had clearly influenced the ‘praise’ poetry of the preceding chapters. As Beatrice dies, so—Dante claims—do egotism and the hope of carnal gratification that he adjudges to linger in the verse of the Bolognese. As shown in the Purgatorio, Guinizzelli’s love poetry, despite its religious rhetoric, did not in Dante’s eyes reach a spiritually tenable solution and remained tarnished by lust. The final test of Dante’s resolve in the libello comes in the form of the ‘donna gentile’ (VN XXXV–XXXVIII). Beset by ‘dolorosi pensamenti’ [painful thoughts] (VN XXXV, 1), Dante catches sight of ‘una gentil

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donna giovane e bella molto’ [a gracious lady, young and exceedingly beautiful], who takes pity upon him. What begins as a non-erotic esteem soon escalates into a treacherous physical attraction (‘li miei occhi si cominciaro a dilettare troppo di vederla’: [my eyes began to enjoy the sight of her too much]: VN XXXVII, 1). The following chapters contain a series of sonnets that convey a struggle between Dante’s appetite and reason, dividing and personifying the body’s faculties in unmistakably Cavalcantian fashion. In the second of these sonnets, ‘L’amaro lagrimar’ [The bitter tears], Dante’s heart reprimands his wandering eyes: ‘La vostra vanità mi fa pensare e spaventami sì, ch’io temo forte del viso d’una donna che vi mira. Voi non dovreste mai, se non per morte, la vostra donna ch’è morta obliare’. Così dice ’l meo core, e poi sospira. (VN XXXVII, 8) [‘I think about your infidelity, and I am frightened; I have come to dread the lady’s face that often looks at you. Until death kills your sight, never should you forget your gracious lady who is dead’. This is what my heart says—and then it sighs.]

While his heart recognizes the peril of his attraction to the ‘donna gentile’, his eyes lead him astray and his loyalty to his ‘gentilissima’ hangs in the balance. The ‘donna gentile’ is described as ‘questo avversario de la ragione’ [this adversary of reason] (VN XXXIX, 1), underlining both the jeopardy of Dante’s love for her and the association with ‘ragione’ that lies only in Dante’s love for Beatrice. As Dante’s attraction to the ‘donna gentile’ burgeons, he suddenly receives a vision of Beatrice. She appears as she did at their very first meeting, and the power of the vision is such that his feelings for her rival are instantly nullified: Allora cominciai a pensare di lei; e ricordandomi di lei secondo l’ordine del tempo passato, lo mio cuore cominciò dolorosamente a pentere de lo desiderio a cui sì vilmente s’avea lasciato possedere alquanti die contra la costanzia della ragione: e discacciato questo cotale malvagio desiderio, sì si rivolsero tutti li miei pensamenti a la loro gentilissima Beatrice. (VN XXXIX, 2) [Then I began to think about her and, remembering her in the sequence of past times, my heart began to repent painfully of the desire by which it so basely let itself be possessed for some time, contrary to the constancy of reason; and once I had discarded this evil desire, all my thoughts turned back to their most gracious Beatrice.]

At once, Dante’s attraction to the ‘donna gentile’ is redefined as ‘evil desire’, as his love is realigned with ‘ragione’ and redirected towards

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Beatrice. The ensuing sonnet consolidates his reinvigorated love for Beatrice, describing how the sensual focus of his wanton eyes has been defeated by his rational faculties (‘li occhi son vinti, e non hanno valore / di riguardar persona che li miri’ [the eyes are vanquished, and they do not dare to return the glance of anyone who sees them]: VN XXXIX, 8). Once more, Dante’s solution to his poetic and moral impasse is born out of the unique quality of his love for Beatrice, which renders love for a woman a spiritually tenable path. Without her influence, Dante slips back towards the moral problems associated with the lyric tradition (and, tellingly, into a Cavalcantian poetics); following her reappearance, his moral and poetic will is refortified. Having overcome the final impasse of the ‘donna gentile’, the libello’s final chapters witness the exaltation of Beatrice taken to an unprecedented level. With Dante’s love for Beatrice reaffirmed, they seek to open avenues for his future poetic treatment of her legacy, as Beatrice accrues an ever greater association with the celestial and the metaphysical, and the profound disjuncture between the respective literary and ideological objectives of the Vita nova and Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ is underscored. The glorification of Beatrice reaches its apogee in the libello’s final lyric, ‘Oltre la spera che più larga gira’, which describes the journey of Dante’s ‘sospiro’ to catch a glimpse of his ‘gentilissima’ in her heavenly glory: Oltre la spera che più larga gira passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core: intelligenza nova, che l’Amore piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira. Quand’elli è giunto là dove disira, vede una donna, che riceve onore, e luce sì, che per lo suo splendore lo peregrino spirito la mira. Vedela tal, che quando ’l mi ridice, io no lo intendo, sì parla sottile al cor dolente, che lo fa parlare. So io che parla di quella gentile, però che spesso ricorda Beatrice, sì ch’io lo ’ntendo ben, donne mie care. (VN XL1, 10–13) [Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round, passes the sigh arisen from my heart; a new intelligence that Love in tears endowed it with is urging it on high. Once arrived at the place of its desiring it sees a lady held in reverence, splendid in light; and through her radiance the pilgrim spirit looks upon her being. But when it tries to tell me what it saw, I cannot understand the subtle words it speaks to the sad heart that makes it speak. I know it tells of that most gracious one, for I often hear the name of Beatrice. This much, at least, is clear to me, dear ladies.]

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The Vita nova ends, as it begins, with a vision, with the difference between them showing the distance covered in the libello.60 The incipit and its keyword ‘oltre’ [beyond] encapsulate a burgeoning sense of transcendence—a love that reaches beyond spatial and temporal confines. For Dante, this need not entail a rupture from the ‘matera amorosa’; the presence of his ‘sospiro’ in Paradise establishes a connection and continuity between the two dimensions, and allows Beatrice to continue as the inspirational force behind his poetry, even if he must acquire an ‘intelligenza nova’ in order to understand her. She no longer stands in place of God, but acts as a mediator between the poet and divine wisdom. In its poetics of transcendence and ineffability, ‘Oltre la spera’, strategically placed at the end of the libello, foreshadows Dante’s depiction of Beatrice in the Paradiso: the fulfilment of the new kind of love poetry theorized here. While Dante’s understanding of his ultimate objective is hazy at this stage (see lines 9–11), the closing chapters are concerned not so much with concluding the narrative of the libello as with laying the groundwork for a poetic future, acting not as an ending, but a new beginning. Dante has shown how embracing divine love need not entail the abandonment of human love. He manages, in the words of Singleton, ‘to reject neither the one nor the other but to keep both in a single suspension—in a single theory of love’.61 Dante’s work thus serves as both a reconstruction and a redefinition of what constitutes love poetry, so that his verse can, in theory at least, proceed thereafter beyond the difficulties that the libello systematically overcomes. If the conclusion of the Vita nova opens the door to a theologized amorous venture, the conclusion of Guittone’s ‘canzoniere’ slams the same door shut. Guittone unequivocally discounts what Dante affirms: the love lyric can inhabit a place unsullied by lust, selfishness, and spiritual irresponsibility. Guittone carries out a sustained project of demystification, culminating with the terminal impasse of the concluding tenzone. The story of Guittone’s erotic ‘canzoniere’ is precisely that there can be no story, only impasse. Its cycles of sonnets spiral inwards until they reach the ugly confrontation of its final tenzone, and the courtly tradition is exposed as rotten to the core. Dante’s Vita nova, meanwhile, spirals outwards, sanctioning new poetic possibilities. Impasse is what the libello has endeavoured to overcome. It leads to a suggestive open-endedness; a space between the poet and paradisal beloved is vacated, if not yet fully exploited. The Vita nova ‘mystifies’ where the ‘canzoniere’ demystifies; it 60 Dronke notes that this final depiction appears not as a dream, as had the account of Love and Beatrice in VN III, but as a genuine vision: P. Dronke, Verse with Prose, p. 113. 61 Singleton, Essay, p. 73.

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welds love poetry to the theological and metaphysical, and reformulates the unalloyed carnal intent that Guittone regards as its essence. The celebrated declaration of its final chapter, ‘io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna’ [I hope to write of her what has never been written of any other woman] (VN XLII, 2) is both the antithesis of the denouement of the ‘canzoniere’ (‘che ’nn-alcun modo non responderaggio’ [there is no way I will respond to you]) and the essence of Dante’s own poetic objective, foreseeing new hope and, indeed, ‘new life’ in his future treatment of the ‘matera amorosa’. Dante and Guittone thus carry out their lyric-narrative experiments with diametrically opposed aims: while Guittone attempts to shatter the integrity of the courtly tradition so as to create a platform whence his career as anti-courtly moralist might proceed, Dante breathes fresh life into it, so that his own future work might raise its stock and grant it greater moral and cultural authority. He does so in clear defiance of Guittone’s conversionary paradigm, which severs vernacular poetry from love and renders earthly love and lust indistinguishable, laying the groundwork for a work such as the Commedia—where desire acts as ‘moto spiritale’ [movement of the spirit] (Purg. XVIII, 32) and the donna leads the pilgrim to God.

3.2 ‘D’AMOR NON PUNTO’: GUITTONE AND DANTE AS ETHICAL LYRICISTS The parameters of Guittone’s ethical corpus,62 which comprises twenty-six canzoni and one hundred and twenty-six sonnets, are once again defined by the Laurenziano manuscript.63 As well as the famous conversion canzoni, we find political poems, religious laude, and sonnets on virtues and vices. Guittone, on becoming an ethical poet, claims that he turns his back upon a tradition whose essence lay in its articulation of unconsummated erotic desire; desire that was not, as the ‘canzoniere’ showed us, a means to an end, 62

While critics have regularly noted the Guittonian flavour of Dante’s ethical lyrics and—in particular—the political invectives of the Commedia, there has been little detailed analysis of the relationship between Dante’s moral canzoni and ‘Fra Guittone’. Ignoring questions of style and rhetoric (widely documented by Barbi-Pernicone, Contini, De Robertis, and Foster-Boyde in their respective editions of the Rime), the most substantial contributions are Barolini’s ‘Anatomy of Desire’ and ‘Sotto benda’; E. Fenzi, ‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria”: Un’interpretazione della canzone dantesca “Poscia ch’Amor” ’, SD, LXIII (1991), 191–280 (pp. 226–39). 63 Some canzoni classified as amatory in the Laurentine manuscript also have a nonamorous focus: see, for example, ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ (XV), the lament for Florence ‘Ahi lasso, or è stagion de doler tanto’ (XIX), and the searching defence of women ‘Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi’ (XX).

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but a pernicious end in itself. While Leonardi has shown that there is more ideological continuity between the two halves of Guittone’s lyric corpus than the poet at first suggests, this small ideological step nonetheless requires a giant poetic leap. As Barolini writes, ‘To desire is a pre-requisite of the courtly code; to eschew this mode of being is to unmoor oneself from a powerful governing paradigm and implicitly to pose the question of what to put in its place.’64 Accordingly, Guittone pens a ‘manifesto’ to proclaim and validate his new ethos.65 This comes in the opening stanzas of his famous palinodic canzone, ‘Ora parrà’: Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare e s’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio, poi che del tutto Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio, e più che cosa mai forte mi spare: ch’a om tenuto saggio audo contare che trovare – non sa né valer punto omo d’Amor non punto; ma’ che digiunto – da vertà mi pare se lo pensare – a lo parlare – sembra, ché ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore regge follore – in loco di savere: donque como valere pò, né piacer – di guisa alcuna fiore, poi dal Fattor – d’ogni valor – disembra e al contrar d’ogni mainer’ asembra? Ma chi cantare vole e valer bene, in suo legno a nocchier Diritto pone e orrato Saver mette al timone, Dio fa sua stella, e ’n ver Lausor sua spene: ché grande onor né gran bene no è stato acquistato – carnal voglia seguendo, ma promente valendo e astenendo – a vizi’ e a peccato; unde ’l sennato – apparecchiato – ognora de core tutto e di poder dea stare d’avanzare – lo suo stato ad onore no schifando labore: 64

Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 48. It is a critical commonplace to refer to the canzone as Fra Guittone’s ‘manifesto’. Borra deems the opening canzone a ‘vero e proprio “manifesto” programmatico di un futuro poetico’ [a true programmatic manifesto for a poetic future] (p. 28), while Tartaro brands it a ‘ “manifesto” della nuova materia guittoniana’ [a manifesto for the new Guittonian subject-matter]: A. Tartaro, ‘La conversione letteraria di Guittone’, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale, 7 (1965), 1057–67 (p. 1057). 65

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ché già riccor – non dona altrui posare ma ’l fa ’lungiare, – e ben pugnare – onora; ma tuttavia lo ’ntenda altri a misora. (VI/XXV 1–30) [Now it will become apparent if I shall know how to sing, and if I am worth as a poet what I was formerly worth, now that I completely flee Love and ‘diswant’ it, and find it more terrible than any other thing. I have heard it said by a man considered wise that a man not pierced by Love does not know how to write poetry and is worth nothing; but this seems far from the truth to me, if thought and word are in agreement, for wherever Love seizes, madness reigns instead of wisdom. So how can he have any worth of any beauty when he turns away from the Creator of all worth and conforms to its opposite in every way? / But he who wants to sing and be truly worthy must make Justice pilot of his ship and place honoured Wisdom at the helm. He must make God his star and Praise his goal. For neither great honour nor great good have been attained by following carnal desire, but instead by living as good men and abstaining from vice and from sin. Therefore the wise man must always be prepared with all his heart and power to advance his state to honour, not shunning labour; since indeed riches do not give anyone peace but in fact distance it, and good striving brings honour, as long as one pursues it with due measure.]

The canzone’s first stanza is autobiographical and metapoetic, reflecting upon the poet’s personal renunciation of Amor and his hope that his new poetics can possess worth in spite of its non-correspondence to courtly values.66 Holmes notes that the ‘deictic “ora” distinguishes the present of this poem . . . from the past movement represented by the love poems’,67 presenting the canzone as the dividing line between two phases that Guittone wishes to present as distinct. The quintessentially Guittonian term ‘disvoglio’ similarly reflects the poet’s ideological shift, as Guittone flees from (‘fugge’) the desire that previously sustained his and others’ verse. Amor leads man away from wisdom and towards folly; it distances him from God (‘Fattor d’ogni valor’) and constitutes a ‘heretical’ creative source.68 Guittone questions the wisdom of a man considered wise, who claims that poetry without love can have no worth, and proclaims an alternative ethos founded upon the wisdom that this desire typically negates (‘ché ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore / regge follore – in loco di savere’).69 66

Barolini notes that the verb valere is used no fewer than five times in this opening stanza, reflecting Guittone’s determination for his new poetic agenda to succeed in the absence of courtly desire; see Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 48. 67 Holmes, ‘Construction of Authenticity’, p. 177. 68 Amor is literally described as heresy (resia) in canzone XXVIII, line 10. 69 The ‘om tenuto saggio’ is held by some critics (see Leonardi, Canzoniere, p. XXI; Tartaro, p. 1061) to be the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, who in the famous passage quoted in Chapter 1 makes explicit the correspondence between poetic worth and erotic

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In contravening the courtly norms set out in the ‘canzoniere’, Fra Guittone defines himself as ‘omo d’Amor non punto’: a man unpierced by love. He deploys the medieval topos of the wound of love, vulnus amoris, which features prominently in both religious and secular discourses of desire.70 As discussed by Heather Webb, the stilnovist poet, possessing a cor gentil, is distinguished by his receptivity—by his heart’s radical openness and sensitivity to external sensory stimuli, its status as a ‘womblike receptacle’ that engenders poetry.71 She discusses how the medieval heart was understood to be necessarily ‘double-gendered’, combining projective (‘masculine’) and receptive (‘feminine’) properties.72 In sharp contrast with the stilnovisti, where the interplay of (receptive) inspiration and (projective) poetic signification resembles the modulations of the heart, Fra Guittone here describes a sealed and impermeable self. This places him at odds with Dante, who in the Commedia remains, in this sense, a feminized poetic subject, ‘trained in proper passivity and receptivity’ over the course of his journey.73 Webb writes that for Dante ‘inspiration must come from outside; poetry cannot be a mere bursting forth of the individual products of a single heart. In this way, properly inspired poetry resembles the generation of spirit. Spirit is not an emission of the heart alone, but is a product of refined blood within the heart, mixed with external air’.74 Fra Guittone, by contrast, proposes here an exclusively and narrowly masculine and ‘projective’ poetics, one closed to all forms of sensory, external inspiration.75 experience. I would suggest that Guittone is reflecting broadly upon a widespread courtly axiom, and that the ‘om tenuto saggio’ is the generic courtly lover-poet. 70 See especially L. Pertile, ‘La punta del disio’, in La punta del disio, pp. 163–79; D. Stewart, The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisbury: Bucknell University Press, 2003). 71 Webb, Medieval Heart, p. 109. ‘Guinizzelli and his poetic “sons” . . . emphasize that poetry must come from somewhere and must speak of, and indeed embody, that source’ (p. 66). 72 See Webb, Medieval Heart, pp. 96–142. ‘The heart is thus both a passive “feminine” reservoir for blood and spirit and the “masculine” center of the body’s active life force, producing animating spirit and the materials of procreation’ (pp. 109–10). 73 Webb, Medieval Heart, p. 134. On the passive subject position of the ‘languishing’ male lover in medieval poetry, see also Stewart, esp. pp. 49–80. 74 Webb, Medieval Heart, p. 130. As Webb writes elsewhere, ‘Congress with the world is full of peril, but it is nonetheless that which sustatins life. While interactions may be risky, isolation, in the long run, inevitably kills’ (p. 125). On the association of love poetry and spirit, see also Agamben, p. 128. 75 On the strong association between sexual desire and femininity, see for example W. E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 68–73. With reference to John of Salisbury, Burgwinkle writes that ‘All arousal thus leads logically to a loss of virility and beneath that veil lies the infinite expanse of the feminine, defined only in the negative: that which is not virile, strong, resistant to pleasure, controlled, contained, or

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The second stanza fills the void that the first sought to create. Having rejected the courtly ethos, the frons plots the moral co-ordinates of the worthy cantor: he must place Justice as pilot of his ship and Wisdom at the helm; he must make God his guiding star and place his hope in praise.76 The entrenched view of the ‘om tenuto saggio’ is thus usurped by the four guiding principles of ‘chi cantare vole e valer bene’ (line 16). The universal ‘chi’ suggests that, while the former notion of poetic worth was born out of a contentious subjectivity (the ‘om’ is merely ‘tenuto saggio’), Guittone’s new poetic model is founded upon universal and unequivocal truth. While the canzone begins deliberating over the value of the poet’s posterotic verse, it quickly shifts to a didactic and archetypally Guittonian mode of expression. As Borra describes, ‘cantare’ and ‘valere’—having existed in conflict—emerge as all but synonymous,77 as self-questioning is ousted by an unambiguous proclamation of what will constitute poetic worth henceforth. In contrast with the values of ‘chi cantare vole e valer bene’ [he who wants to sing and be truly worthy] is the submission to ‘carnal voglia’ [carnal desire] of line 21. This is a crucial opposition, for Guittone implies that the essence of his—and others’—love poetry has lain simply in a surrender to lust. What was implicit in the ‘canzoniere’, at least until the final tenzone, is now explicit: the lover’s motives were purely carnal, his cortesia merely a charade. In opposition to this carnal desire is the abstinence (‘astenendo’) of line 23, introducing us to the sort of dualism that will become the hallmark of Fra Guittone: the worldly desire that leads us to sin cannot be reformulated, but must be rejected. Unlike mystical theologians who deploy a dynamic language of desire in articulating their love for God, Guittone’s moral choices here are stark and simplistic, as reflected in the binary construction of his corpus. His reader should do as he has, in life as in poetry, replacing worldly desire with a ‘bourgeois ethic’ of abstinence, faith, and graft.78

governable. Where femininity and sodomy begin, end, and overlap is difficult to ascertain’ (p. 73). 76 Holmes (‘Construction of Authenticity’, p. 180) and Barolini (Dante’s Poets, p. 106) note the Dantean resonance of this metaphor. 77 Borra, p. 29. 78 Barolini, ‘Dante and the Lyric Past’, p. 28. Barolini views Guittone as the voice of the burgeoning mercantile class. He recommends ‘a life of measured toil and measured gain, leavened by the pursuit of “orrato Saver” and the advancement of one’s “stato ad onore”: an honoured position in the community and a wisdom conceived in terms less metaphysical than practical and ethical’ (p. 29). She claims that the one worldly desire for which Guittone makes an exception is ‘measured’ material acquisition, noting in ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ the striking phrase ‘aquistare gaudendo’ [joyfully acquiring] (XV, 74).

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‘Carnal voglia’ is not the only vice denounced in the second stanza. Instead, as discussed by Barolini, courtly lust is attacked along with the more ‘ugly’ sin of avarice (‘riccor’).79 The canzone is not simply a remonstration against lust, but against worldly appetite more generally: the ‘folle talento’ [mad desire] of line 78. The attack on the avaricious reaches its climax in the poem’s fourth stanza: ‘Non manti acquistan l’oro, / ma l’oro loro’ [few acquire gold, rather gold acquires them] (52–3). This stanza bears all the trademarks of the poet’s ethical verse; sententious in its message but thorny and ornate in its expression.80 It again exemplifies Guittone’s pervasive use of antithesis, contrasting ostensible (worldly) and bona fide (spiritual) gratification (‘In vita more, e sempre in morte vive’ [He dies in life, and always lives in death]: 46). The stanza is constructed around an overarching opposition between the miser’s vice (lines 46–54) and their corrective virtues (lines 55–60), pivoting upon an adversative ‘Ma’ in line 55. Looking back at the opening two stanzas, we find a similar ‘Ma’ in lines 16 and 22. There, the poet diametrically opposes an ethic based upon the worldly desire of Amor with one that eschews such desire and replaces it with temperate rationality. The traits noted in ‘Ora parrà’ permeate Guittone’s palinodic canzoni. For instance, the opening of ‘Ora parrà’, where the personal reflection of the first stanza gives way to the sermonic universality of the second, is echoed in the following palinodic canzone in the Laurenziano manuscript, whose structure is almost identical to that of the ‘manifesto’. As in ‘Ora parrà’, Guittone uses the opening stanza to call himself to account and lament his erotic misdoings: ‘Vergogna ho, lasso, ed ho me stesso ad ira / e doveria via piú, reconoscendo / co male usai fior del tempo mio’ [I am ashamed, alas, and angry with myself, and I should be all the more, recognizing how badly I used my prime years] (XXVI, 1–3). Like the shift to ‘Chi’ in the second stanza of ‘Ora parrà’, however, the second stanza here focuses not upon Fra Guittone’s own moral status, but that of the ‘genere omano’.81 Again, the core of the poem is universal in its emphasis and didactic in its intent: the more searching and subjective 79

See Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 50. It says something of Fra Guittone’s syntactical opacity that ‘Ora parrà’ is deemed one of his more limpid moral canzoni. Borra states that ‘ci troviamo di fronte ad un miracolo di equilibrio in quanto la notevole complessità strutturale riesce, contrariamente a quanto accade in altri luoghi guittoniani, a non oscurare particolarmente il dettato’ [We find here a miracle of balance in that the considerable structural complexity generally manages, unlike elsewhere in Guittone’s work, not to obscure the meaning of the poetry] (Borra, p. 28). 81 An analogous shift occurs in canzone XXVII, where the ‘riconsiderazione critica del passato’ [critical re-evaluation of the past] of the opening two stanzas becomes ‘un canto di lode in onore della “figlia, madre e sposa” ’ [a song or praise in honour of the daughter, mother and wife] (Borra, p. 58). 80

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opening stanza quickly gives way to a more general form of moralizing. Guittone thus forges an anti-lyric discourse, foregoing not only love but also the interiority associated with vernacular lyric poetry. Antithesis fuels almost the entirety of the canzone ‘O tu, de nome Amore, guerra de fatto’ [O you, love in name, war in fact]. As Borra describes, Amor undergoes a process of drastic redefinition,82 whereby the faulty love of yore is replaced with the love for God celebrated by Guittone in the following poem, ‘O vera vertù, o vero amore’ [O true virtue, o true love]. In the opening stanza of ‘O tu, de nome Amore’, Guittone writes: Per che seguo ragion, non lecciaria, und’ho già mante via portato in loco di gran ver menzogna ed in loco d’onor propia vergogna, in loco di saver rabbi’ e follia; or torno de resia in dritta e in verace oppinïone: e, se mostranza di viva ragione valer potesse ai guerrer ditti amanti, credo varraggio lor, ché ’n modi manti demosterrò la lor condizion rea. (XXVIII, 5–15) [Because I follow reason, not that lechery which many times led me to lies instead of truth, and shame instead of honour, and frenzied madness instead of wisdom; now I return from that heresy to the righteous and truthful view: and, if a sound and rational argument can help those warriors who call themselves lovers, I believe I shall benefit them, for in many ways I will show that their condition is dishonourable.]

These lines, particularly lines 5–11, are highly characteristic of Fra Guittone, with the opposition of ‘saver’ and ‘follia’ in line 9 repeating almost verbatim lines 10 and 11 of ‘Ora parrà’. The phrase ‘in loco di’ functions as the grammatical mechanism through which Guittone posits his opposition between the folly he has left behind and the rectitude to which he now returns. It is a phrase that underlines Guittone’s signature dualism: reason simply replaces lust, as truth replaces heresy. While this seems far from the integrative emphasis of Dante’s poetry, the years following the Vita nova see a very different Dante, who displays a more ambivalent relationship with Guittone, especially as an ethical lyricist. We cannot impose a bipartition upon Dante’s rime between their amatory and their ethical phases, as the Laurenziano manuscript does upon Guittone’s, since love and ethics always form part of Dante’s 82

Borra, p. 35.

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agenda. In the De vulgari, Dante grants himself the mantle of Italian ‘cantor rectitudinis’ [poet of rectitude], showing that, at the time of that work (c.1305), he principally considered himself a moral poet. As noted by Giunta, Dante’s decision to grant himself this mantle is doubtless motivated by his determination to suppress ‘[il] solo poeta italiano che aveva tutte le carte in regola per aspirare al titolo di cantor rectitudinis, Guittone d’Arezzo’ [the one Italian poet who had all the traits necessary to aspire to the title of cantor rectitudinis: Guittone d’Arezzo].83 Yet the early years of the fourteenth century also saw Dante compose a significant amount of love poetry—both erotic and allegorical. Where we can impose a bipartition of sorts is between the Vita nova and the rime of the following years, which—for all their diversity—are ideologically distinct from the theologized love poetry of the Vita nova. As noted in Chapter 1, these writings, which cover the approximate period 1295–1307 and do not feature Beatrice, consistently theorize the relationship between desire and reason in a more dualistic fashion than the libello. Where love and ethics were once integrated, they now constitute distinct ends. Dante’s love poetry becomes fatalistic and morally problematic, while his ethical verse distances itself from human love. Barbi’s edition of Dante’s Rime groups seven lyrics from the middle years of his career under the heading ‘Rime allegoriche e dottrinali’ [Allegorical and doctrinal lyrics].84 While five of these are allegorical rather than ethical, using the language of human love to describe the poet’s love for philosophy, the other two constitute Dante’s first attempts at an exclusively ethical poetry: the ‘doctrinal’ canzoni ‘Le dolci rime’ (on nobility) and ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ (on the courtly virtue of ‘leggiadria’ [gracefulness]). Later, among the thematically miscellaneous lyrics that Barbi brackets as ‘Rime varie del tempo dell’esilio’ [Various lyrics from the period of exile], we find two more poems pertaining to the sphere of ethics: the exile canzone ‘Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute’ [Three women have come round my heart] and the dynamic tirade against cupidity, ‘Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire’ [Grief brings boldness to my heart]. These poems cover a period of around ten years, and together shed light not only upon Dante’s developing style and ideology as an ethical poet, but also a period of greater ambivalence with respect to his relationship to Guittone. 83

Giunta, La poesia italiana, p. 57. These lyrics are ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’, ‘Voi che savete’, ‘Amor che ne la mente’, ‘Le dolci rime’, ‘Poscia ch’Amor’, ‘Parole mie’, and ‘O dolci rime’. See Dante Alighieri, Rime della maturità e dell’esilio, ed. by M. Barbi and V. Pernicone (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), pp. 375–465. 84

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An interesting yet often overlooked window into into Dante’s thinking in this period comes in the sonnet ‘Due donne’ (Rime 33), where Dante personifies Beauty and Virtue as women who seek to find a place in his heart. These donne have come to the ‘summit’ of the poet’s mind, and seek not to quarrel, but to reason: Due donne in cima de la mente mia venute sono a ragionar d’amore: l’una ha in sé cortesia e valore, prudenza e onestà in compagnia; l’altra ha bellezza e vaga leggiadria, adorna gentilezza le fa onore: e io, merzé del dolce mio signore, mi sto a piè de la lor signoria. Parlan Bellezza e Virtú a l’intelletto e fan quistion come un cor puote stare intra due donne con amor perfetto. Risponde il fonte del gentil parlare ch’amar si può bellezza per diletto e puossi amar virtú per operare. (33) [Two women have come to the summit of my mind to speak of love. One is accompanied by courtesy and goodness, moral wisdom and decorum; the other has beauty and lovely charm, and fair nobility does her honour. And I—thanks to my dear Lord—kneel at their ladyships’ feet. Beauty and Virtue speak to my intellect, debating the question how a heart can be divided between two ladies with perfect love. The source of noble speech pronounces thus: beauty can be loved for delight and virtue for the sake of action.]

In its ‘balance of . . . secular and spiritual values’,85 we might view ‘Due donne’ as a further expression of the anti-Cavalcantian, anti-Guittonian integration of love and ethics found in the Vita nova. ‘Bellezza’ and ‘Virtù’ are not, as one might suspect, in conflict, but harmonized, since each has its own end (‘per diletto’/‘per operare’). For Contini, the sonnet describes ‘una sorta di conflictus interno fra Bellezza e Virtù . . . indicativo dell’ideale supremo che Dante si propose verso i trent’anni, la fusione dell’eleganza mondana e della rectitudo, delle qualità laiche e chiericali insieme’ [a kind of internal conflictus between Beauty and Virtue, indicative of the supreme ideal proposed by Dante around the age of 30, the fusion of worldly beauty and ethics, of secular and religious values].86 85

O. Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, p. 21. Contini, Rime, p. 395. Foster and Boyde state: ‘The poet of courtly love who is also bent on personally realizing, in his own life, the precepts of Aristotelian moral philosophy here brings together, contrasting and then reconciling them, the two ideals implied in this 86

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Nonetheless, the sonnet reflects a subtle but important shift in Dante’s ideology. Not only has Beatrice disappeared from his poetry, but the two distinct ends of ‘operare’ and ‘diletto’ seem to run contrary to the Vita nova, where ‘bellezza’ and ‘virtù’ were not only non-conflictual but positively integrated in the figure of Beatrice. Unalloyed to ethics, ‘per diletto’ seems to suggest a more frivolous form of worldly pleasure, not least in light of Inferno V (‘leggiavamo un giorno per diletto’ [we were reading one day for pleasure]: 127), one reminiscent, as noted by Holmes, of Augustine’s opposition between uti and frui.87 In short, the poet seems less concerned with fusing these poles than justifying his vacillation between them: a model that will, in different guises, govern Dante’s thought until the return of Beatrice in the Commedia. ‘Virtù’ (or ‘vertù’)—a noun more suggestive here of temporal rectitude than spiritual rapture—is, in fact, a term seldom found in the Vita nova: it appears only six times, compared to seventy-four times in the Convivio.88 I would argue that it is to the Convivio above all, as discussed in Chapter 1, that ‘Due donne’ points. In particular, the distinct ends of ‘operare’ and ‘diletto’ seem to anticipate the allegorical exposition of the treatise’s first two canzoni, ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ and ‘Amor che ne la mente’. It is thought that these canzoni were written by Dante in the mid-1290s, although they were only expounded allegorically ten years later. As we know, Dante tells us that the Amor they describe is his love of Philosophy.89 They preserve the style—and, in terms of their literal sense, double aim’ (II, 240). Contini links this fusion to the celebration of both absolute virtue and relative virtue (the courtly virtue of leggiardria) that we find in ‘Poscia ch’Amor’: a view corroborated by Foster and Boyde and De Robertis. See Contini, Rime, p. 395; FosterBoyde, II, 242; De Robertis, in Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. by D. De Robertis (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la fondazione Egio Franceschini, 2005), p. 332. Fenzi (‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria” ’, pp. 195–9) has noted discrepancies between the understanding of leggiadria we find in ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ and in ‘Due donne’, and instead highlights persuasive links between the sonnet and poems from the time of the Vita nova. While Contini places the poem alongside the doctrinal canzoni ‘Le dolci rime’ and ‘Poscia ch’Amor’, Fenzi argues that the sonnet was composed in the period between the libello and the allegorical canzoni, stylistically reminiscent of the Vita nova, later included in the Convivio. 87 See Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, pp. 21–2, where she argues that the two ends also recall Horace (‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae’: Ars poetica 333). Holmes elsewhere links them to the ‘due felicitadi’ of temporal and eternal happiness described in Convivio IV, xvii, 9: see O. Holmes, ‘Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics as Erotic Choice’, Annali d’italianistica, 19 (2001), 25–50 (p. 33). 88 On the more complex connotations of the term ‘virtù’ in the Commedia, see R. Chester, ‘Dante’s “virtù”: Creation, Embodiment, and Revelation’, Italian Studies, 70 (2015), 19–32. 89 Foster and Boyde (II, 161) note that Dante’s Lady Philosophy is a more sophisticated form of personification than the ‘obvious personifications, with all their iconographic trimmings’ used by Boethius and Martianus Capella in late antiquity.

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the content—that Dante refined in the Vita nova, sharing the libello’s tonal ‘sweetness’ and narrow, principally abstract lexicon.90 Yet while Dante is at this stage unwilling to relinquish the aesthetic he invested so much in refining,91 there has nonetheless been an important shift in his approach to love poetry. He no longer suggests that love for a human being can enable moral amelioration, as he had in the Vita nova, but rather uses the language of love as a means of articulating abstract truths. Indeed, according to the poem’s allegorical exposition, love and virtue appear dialectical. This does not mean a poem cannot possess ‘bellezza’ and ‘virtù’; rather, as both ‘Due donne’ and the Convivio describe, aesthetics and ethics serve different ends. The beauty of the poems’ literal sense is merely ‘bella menzogna’ [beautiful fiction], while the allegorical content provides the vital ethical sustenance. Beauty in the Convivio, and with it earthly love, is only as a matter of ‘diletto’, while ‘operare’, a verb wholly absent from the Vita nova, and highly redolent of Fra Guittone (for whom man was created ‘solamente a drittura operare’ [only to operate righteously]), takes precedence. On the one hand, then, by placing ‘bellezza’ and ‘virtù’ in a kind of harmony, Dante again seems to affirm his desire to go beyond a Guittonian dualism; yet, by separating ‘diletto’ and ‘operare’, and moving from one donna to two, dualism re-emerges. The transition from Beatrice to the ‘due donne’ marks an important turning point in Dante’s Rime, a rejection of the Vita nova’s more radical integration that will lead him back towards the Aretine poet. While the allegorical canzoni in praise of Lady Philosophy retain the aesthetic of Dante’s poetry for Beatrice, the Convivio’s third canzone, ‘Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i solia’ [The tender rhymes of love I once sought], probably composed in the mid-1290s,92 sees a more emphatic change of style and direction, as Dante contradicts the Vita nova and writes a vernacular poem ‘sopra altra matera che amorosa’ [on a subject other than love]. The implicit separation of love and ethics in the allegorical poems now becomes explicit. The opening stanza presents Dante at a crossroads, as he describes his decision to write about a matter other than love—and to adopt a corresponding stylistic register—for the first time: Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia cercar ne miei pensieri, 90 As Foster and Boyde note (II, 173), ‘Amor che ne la mente’ is extremely similar, in terms of structure, content, and style, to Dante’s archetypal ‘praise’ canzone, ‘Donne ch’avete’. 91 I would agree with Foster and Boyde that Dante was probably committed to his refined love poetry ‘precisely because of its polemical origins’ (II, 212). 92 Dante states that the canzone dates back to the period of his philosophical studies following Beatrice’s death (Conv. IV, I, 3–8).

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption convien ch’io lasci; non perch’io non speri ad esse ritornare, ma perché li atti disdegnosi e feri che ne la donna mia sono appariti m’han chiusa la via de l’usato parlare. E poi che tempo mi par d’aspettare disporrò giù lo mio soave stile, ch’i’ ho tenuto nel trattar d’amore; e dirò del valore, per lo qual veramente omo è gentile, con rima aspr’e sottile; riprovando ’l giudicio falso e vile di quei che voglion che di gentilezza sia principio ricchezza. E, cominciando, chiamo quel signore ch’a la mia donna ne li occhi dimora, per ch’ella di se stessa s’innamora. (Conv. IV, lines 1–20)

[The sweet love poetry I was accustomed to seek out in my thoughts I must now forsake; not that I do not hope to return to it, but the proud hard bearing that has become apparent in my lady has barred the path of my usual speech. And so, since it now seems a time for waiting, I will lay down that sweet style of mine which I held to in writing of love, and I will speak instead in harsh and subtle rhymes concerning the quality by which man is truly noble; refuting the false and base opinion of those who hold that nobility depends on wealth. And at the outset I invoke that Lord who dwells in my lady’s eyes, and thus makes her in love with herself.]

This is a stanza of poetic conversion, of laying down one subject in order to adopt another. His temporary abandonment of love is presented not as a voluntary change on the part of the poet, however, but a necessity born out of his lady’s recent disdain towards him. Dante tells us—in line with the exposition of the previous canzoni—that this impasse is to be understood allegorically, and that he has experienced difficulties understanding primordial matter that have temporarily impeded his philosophical development (Conv. IV, i, 8). His change of subject is an attempt to continue to work around this impasse. And so rather than ‘trattar d’amore’, he is now to speak of the virtue of nobility (‘gentilezza’). This entails not only a change of theme, but also a change of style, as the poet’s ‘dolci rime’—the essence of his verse hitherto—are replaced by ‘rima aspr’e sottile’ (line 14): a style more lexically astringent and intellectually demanding.93 93 This change of style in accordance with the change of materia is a ‘cardinal principle of rhetoric’ (Foster-Boyde, II, 212). The asprezza here, writes De Robertis, ‘sta . . . nell’uso di vocabolario specifico e d’espedienti d’ordine tecnico’ [lies in the use of vocabulary and

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If the Vita nova was written in ideological and stylistic opposition to Guittone, the Dante of this middle period, and especially of the doctrinal canzoni, enjoys a far more ambivalent relationship with his predecessor, not only insofar as he embraces ethical and political themes, but also in the style of his poetry, which adopts the signature cragginess, the ‘rima aspr’e sottile’, of the Aretine.94 It is in fact illuminating to consider the opening stanza of ‘Le dolci rime’ alongside the opening stanza of ‘Ora parrà’, as each poet announces his abandonment of love poetry in embracing a ‘weightier’ theme. In making this transition from love poetry to ethical poetry, especially in such an emphatic manner, it seems certain that Dante was mindful of Guittone’s precedent.95 If this is so, then the opening of ‘Le dolci rime’ seems to take on greater significance. Although Dante now assumes the mantle of non-erotic vernacular poet that he once decried, he continues to define love poetry as ‘l’usato parlare’ [his usual speech]. He stresses that although he abandons love poetry, he does not intend to do so permanently (‘non perch’io non speri ad esse ritornare’ [not because I do not wish to return to it]). It seems that Dante underscores his ongoing faith in the ‘matera amorosa’ lest he be seen by his readers as following Guittone’s model of conversion. In this light, the apparently inconsequential ‘non perché’ [not because] takes on a particular significance. It prompts us to consider a converse statement: that is, ‘I leave behind love poetry because I reject it and do not wish to return to it’—the exact sense of the equivalent lines (3–4) of ‘Ora parrà’: Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare e s’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio, poi che del tutto Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio, e più che cosa mai forte mi spare: (XXV, 1–4) devices of a technical nature] (Rime, p. 53). If, as seems probable, ‘Le dolci rime’ follows the allegorical canzoni of the mid-1290s, this stanza represents a watershed in Dante’s stylistic development. ‘From this poem through to the end of the Paradiso, Dante draws ever more freely on the whole expressive means which one may find catalogued in the artes rhetoricae. . . . Earlier development had taken the form of a contraction, but all later development is expansion’: Foster-Boyde, II, 212. 94 Barolini links the shift in lexis in the opening of ‘Le dolci rime’ to the concluding lines of Guittone’s ‘Altra fiata’: ‘E dice alcun ch’è duro / e aspro mio trovato a savorare; / e pote esser vero’ [And some say my poetry is hard and harsh to savour; and that may be true] (163–5): Dante’s Poets, pp. 106–7. Dante, as Foster and Boyde put it, was by now ‘sufficiently mature to be able to learn from Guittone and take over what he found significant’ (II, 212). See also Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, p. 61; Fenzi, ‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria” ’, pp. 226–39. 95 Fenzi notes that ‘Le dolci rime’ and ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ ‘esibiscono sin dai loro primi versi una nuova poetica, al servigio di nuovi contenuti, che può ricordare abbastanza da vicino la nota conversione di Guittone’ [exhibit from their opening verses a new poetics, at the service of a new type of content, that brings to mind the well-known conversion of Guittone]: ‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria” ’, pp. 226–7.

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[Now it will become apparent if I shall know how to sing, and if I am worth as a poet what I was formerly worth, now that I completely flee Love and ‘diswant’ it, and find it more terrible than any other thing.]

Thus, while lines three to four of Dante’s poem stress the temporary nature of his abandonment of the ‘matera amorosa’, the corresponding lines of Guittone’s ‘manifesto’ describe the permanence of his. Dante attends to the Guittonian paradigm and implies that his poetry has, by contrast, broadened, rather than entirely shifted, its focus. Yet while Dante stresses his determination not to sever his verse from love, this is precisely what the poem itself does. Like Guittone’s canzone, it sees Dante eschew external inspiration, which he says is no longer available to him (‘m’han chiusa la via / de l’usato parlare’ [they have barred the path of my usual speech]). The poem instead proceeds as a dry and learned piece of reasoning, deconstructing Frederick II’s misconceived understanding of nobility as rooted not in virtue but in wealth and lineage (‘riprovando ’l giudicio falso e vile’ [refuting the false and base opinion]).96 The congedo brands the poem a ‘Contra-li-erranti’, underlining its didactic objective and, in echoing the title of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles, the scholastic foundations of its argumentation (see Conv. IV, xxx, 3). I cite the fourth stanza: Né voglion che vil uom gentil divegna, né di vil padre scenda nazion che per gentil già mai s’intenda; questo è da lor confesso: onde lor ragion par che sé offenda in tanto quanto assegna che tempo a gentilezza si convegna, diffinendo con esso. Ancor, segue di ciò che innanzi ho messo, che siam tutti gentili o ver villani, o che non fosse ad uom cominciamento; ma ciò io non consento, ned ellino altressì se son cristiani! Per che a ’ntelletti sani è manifesto i lor diri esser vani, e io così per falsi li riprovo, e da lor mi rimovo; 96 The canzone, states Pernicone, ‘segue rigorosamente il procedimento caratteristico della quaestio disputata secondo la tradizione tomistico-aristotelica: prima si riprova il falso e poi si dimostra il vero’ [follows closely the procedure characteristic of the quaestio disputata in the Aristotelian–Thomistic tradition: first the false claim is condemned then the true one is demonstrated]: V. Pernicone, ‘Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i solia’, in ED, III, 609–10.

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Guittone d’Arezzo e dicer voglio omai, sì com’io sento, che cosa è gentilezza, e da che vene, e dirò i segni che ’l gentile uom tene.

(61–80)

[Now my opponents maintain that a base man can never himself become noble, and that the offspring of a base father can never be reckoned noble: this is what they say. Clearly then their position is self-contradictory, inasmuch as they make time a factor in nobility, including it in their definition. Again, it follows from the foregoing that either we are all noble or all plebeian, or else that mankind didn’t have one beginning; but this alternative I do not admit, and neither do they if they are Christians. Consequently it is clear to every healthy mind that their statements are groundless; and so, having refuted them as false, I turn away from them. And now I for my part will say what I think about nobility: what it is, whence it comes, and the distinctive features that a noble person possesses.]

Dante here deconstructs the illogic of the erranti through a syllogism. He refutes Frederick’s notion that nobility is rooted in lineage, the corollary of which would be that the ‘vil uom’ could not become noble. This reasoning, for Dante, is self-contradictory (‘onde lor ragion par che sé offenda’): it necessarily implies that we, as children of Adam, are either all noble or all base; or else it negates the doctrine of Creation, which is clearly not permissible if the erranti are to call themselves Christians. The reductio ad absurdum of lines 74–7 ridicules the very idea that the notion he has attacked might foster truth: its logical inconsistency has been made clear to all ‘’ntelletti sani’, and can now be laid to rest. Finally, Dante outlines the content of the remainder of his canzone: he will describe what nobility is, whence it derives, and the characteristics of the nobleman. This kind of quaestio through vernacular poetry, deployed here by Dante for the first time, is far removed from the poetics of the Vita nova—its points of reference are found less in Occitan and Italian love poetry than classical rhetoric and scholastic philosophy—but will clearly inform numerous doctrinal passages of the Commedia. While a key moment in Dante’s stylistic evolution, however, it emerges as an ideological wrong turn. It sees Dante write not so much as a poet but—as De Sanctis defined Guittone—as a ‘sottile ragionatore in versi’ [subtle reasoner in verse]. Besides the opening stanza, the subjectivity of Dante’s love poetry is altogether extracted, as Dante fills the vacuum of desire with dispassionate scholastic discourse. Its vernacularity, like that of the Convivio itself, seems connected only to its vulgarizing objectives, with the subjectivity of the vernacular lyric effaced. Let us compare a passage from Fra Guittone’s ‘O tu, de nome Amor’: Ché ’l principio n’è reo: ch’attende e brama ciò che maggiormente ama;

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption mangiar, dormir, posar non può, pensando pur di veder lei che lo stringe amando; e ’l mezzo è reo, ch’adessa el fa geloso; afamat’ e bramoso sta manti giorni, e poi pascesi un’ora u poco u troppo in angostia e in paura; e se bon fusse el primo, el mezzo e tutto, la fine è pur rea. (XXVIII, 35–44)

[For the beginning is wretched: the lover awaits and longs for that which he loves; he cannot eat, sleep, or rest, thinking about her who urges him to love; the means too is wretched, rendering him jealous; covetous and craving he remains for days, and then spends an hour or less or more in anguish and in fear; and even if the first stage and the middle were sound, the end too is wretched.]

This critique of human love is Fra Guittone at his most grimly austere and sententious, as he disassembles Amor in terms of its ‘principio’, ‘mezzo’, and ‘fine’. Such arch didacticism would tend to be viewed as the antithesis of Dante’s more affective emphasis. Yet ‘Le dolci rime’ deconstructs a misconceived idea in the same sort of systematic fashion. While critics also link the canzone to Guinizelli’s notion of a nobility rooted in virtue (in ‘Al cor gentil’) and the rhetorical and philosophical mastery of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna me prega’, it ultimately shares more with Fra Guittone than with any other of Dante’s vernacular precursors. Indeed, Fenzi notes that Fra Guittone himself had offered an almost identical definition of nobility in his canzone ‘Comune perta fa comun dolore’: ‘Non ver lignaggio fa sangue, ma core’ [The heart, not lineage, makes true nobility] (XLVI, 49).97 The canzone ‘Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato’ [Since Love has altogether abandoned me] is practically a companion piece to ‘Le dolci rime’. The two poems share close structural, stylistic, and thematic links, and are probably contemporaneous.98 Where ‘Le dolci rime’ dispelled myths concerning nobility, ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ performs a similar task with regard to leggiadria: a courtly quality of social grace. Leggiadria, Dante argues, is not born out of extravagant spending (‘messione’: line 26), ostentatious dressing (‘ornarsi’: line 34), or affected gaiety (‘intendimenti / correnti’: lines 40–1), but, like nobility, is rooted in virtue. I cite the opening stanza:

97

See Fenzi, p. 228. On the close connections between the two canzoni, see V. Pernicone, ‘Le prime rime dottrinali di Dante’, Belfagor, 20 (1965), 501–17 (especially p. 513). 98

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Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato, non per mio grato, ché stato non avea tanto gioioso, ma però che pietoso fu tanto del meo core che non sofferse d’ascoltar suo pianto; i’ canterò cosí disamorato contra ’l peccato, ch’è nato in noi, di chiamare a ritroso tal ch’è vile e noioso con nome di valore, cioè di leggiadria, ch’è bella tanto che fa degno di manto imperïal colui dov’ella regna: ell’è verace insegna la qual dimostra u’ la vertú dimora; perch’io son certo, se ben la difendo nel dir com’io la ’ntendo, ch’Amor di sé mi farà grazia ancora. (30, 1–19) [Since Love has completely abandoned me—not by my choice, for never had I been so happy, but because he took such pity on my heart that he could not bear to listen to its weeping—I will direct my song, thus devoid of love as I am, against the error which has arisen amongst us of misnaming something which is base and boorish by giving it a name connoting goodness, that is by calling it charm—a thing so fair as to make him in whom it reigns fit for an emperor’s mantle. It is a sure sign of indwelling virtue; and so I am certain that if I defend it well, by declaring how I conceive it, Love will be gracious to me once more.]

Links to ‘Le dolci rime’ are immediately apparent. As in the earlier canzone, Dante justifies his temporary abandonment of love, though his impasse here appears more acute, for love has altogether (‘del tutto’) abandoned him. This again recalls ‘Ora parrà’, not least in its use of ‘del tutto’, but tellingly it is Love here that altogether abandons Dante, whereas it was of course Fra Guittone who altogether abandoned Love. As in the earlier canzone, Dante condemns those who mistakenly define (‘chiamare a ritroso’) a positive quality in a manner that engenders moral corruption. Yet, while Dante describes the relationship between virtue and leggiadria through a syllogism in stanza 4 (lines 70–6), his protest is at times expressed with greater vigour than in ‘Le dolci rime’:99

99 It is, say Foster and Boyde (II, 228), ‘more rhetorical, less logical’ than the earlier canzone.

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption Qual non dirà fallenza divorar cibo ed a lussuria intendere? ornarsi, come vendere si dovesse al mercato di non saggi? ché ’l saggio non pregia om per vestimenta, ch’altrui sono ornamenta, ma pregia il senno e li genti coraggi. (30, 32–8)

[Who will not call it folly to guzzle and give oneself over to lechery? To deck oneself out as though one were up for sale at Vanity Fair? For the wise do not esteem a man for his clothes, which are outward adornments, but for intelligence and nobility of heart.]

Dante here attacks vulgar customs rather than logical inconsistencies, using language suggestive of decadence (‘divorar’, ‘ornarsi’) and rhetorical questions to underscore the boorishness of the ‘falsi leggiadri’. The final three lines constitute a very Guittonian axiom, describing how these misdeeds contravene the values of a ‘saggio’, who prizes wisdom and courage over clothing. ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ is also reminiscent of Guittone in its style, with its rimalmezzo (which also recalls Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna me prega’) and Provençalisms strongly redolent of the Aretine.100 Yet while the canzone’s didacticism and syntax point increasingly towards the Aretine poet, subtle differences remain. Again, the temporary nature of Dante’s abandonment of the ‘matera amorosa’, and his resolve to return to it, show that Dante’s shift to ethical verse takes place on different terms than Guittone’s. This is also underlined by the nature of the quality that ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ defends, for the very concept of leggiadria presupposes the possibility of a morally viable category of human love— something that Guittone, of course, denies. It is possible, claims Dante, to court ladies in a morally viable fashion (‘donneare a guisa di leggiadro’), which few men now do. Guittone, indeed, tellingly used ‘leggiadra’ as a term of abuse in sonnet 81: ‘e·sse’ leggiadra ed altizzosa e strana’ [and you are flighty and haughty and strange].101

100 Fenzi (‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria” ’, pp. 229–31) offers examples of other stylistic guittonismi in Dante’s canzone. ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ and ‘Donna me prega’ are cited in the De vulgari eloquentia (II, xii, 8) on account of their metre; ‘Ora parrà’, naturally, is not. The use of rimalmezzo as well as the sheer weight of the ideas expressed link ‘Donna me prega’ to ‘Ora parrà’: see Marti, ‘Guittone e i guittoniani’, p. 336. 101 It is interesting, as Barolini shows, that the terms ‘leggiadria’ and ‘donneare’ resurface in Dante’s Paradiso, ‘where courtly values, morphed and reinvigorated . . . resurface’. See Par. XXIV, 118–19 and XXVII, 88–9. Barolini continues: ‘Poscia ch’Amor shows us Dante struggling to accommodate courtly values he cherishes within a moral system already clearly influenced by Aristotelian and Scholastic ethics’ (‘Sotto benda’, p. 339).

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While the canzone again subtly diverges from the ideology of Fra Guittone, it nonetheless reflects Dante’s ‘maturo ripensamento’ [mature re-evaluation] of his predecessor.102 With regard to ‘Poscia ch’Amor’, Vincenzo Pernicone writes: È certo che con questa canzone Dante si avvicinava a un modello non gradito, alla poesia moraleggiante di Guittone d’Arezzo, e forse congiuravano insieme l’antipatia verso il poeta aretino e il perdurante pregiudizio che in lingua volgare non si dovesse rimare sopra altra matera che amorosa . . . per fare sì che Dante rinunziasse, dopo Poscia ch’Amor, a interessarsi di questioni morali sociali e politiche che la travagliata situazione del comune fiorentino in quegli anni anteriori al suo esilio gli offriva abbondantemente.103 [With this canzone, Dante certainly came close to an unwelcome model, the moralizing poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo, and it was perhaps due to his antipathy towards the Aretine poet and his enduring conviction that poetry in the vernacular should not be written about any topic other than love that Dante ceased, after ‘Poscia ch’Amor’, to concern himself with the moral, social and political questions which the embattled state of the Florentine commune, in those years prior to his exile, offered him in abundance.]

Intriguingly, in light of the two poets’ close association in Purgatorio XXVI, ‘Poscia ch’Amor’ is redolent of Giraut de Borneil as well as Guittone.104 Giraut’s sirventes ‘Per solaz reveillar che s’es trop endormiz’ [To awaken those courtly pleasures that have been asleep too long], which similarly laments the passing of the courtly virtue of Solatz (Dante refers to ‘sollazzo’ in line 89), is cited in the De vulgari eloquentia (II, ii, 8) as the foremost example of Occitan ethical poetry. The ‘courtly’ virtue (‘leggiadria’) that Dante extols in this canzone, along with the Provençalisms that permeate its lexicon, further hint at a partly Occitan source of inspiration. Picone interestingly describes how certain medieval manuscripts of Giraut’s work divide his corpus, like Guittone’s, between erotic cansos and ethical sirventeses.105 This is reflected in a stylistic shift from the ‘pauzat’ to the ‘subtils’, which recalls the shift from the Vita nova’s ‘dolcezza’ to the Convivio’s ‘rime aspr’e sottile’, and the division of ‘amoris accensio’ and ‘directio voluntatis’ that Dante endorses in the De vulgari. These various elements point to an alignment on Dante’s part with the non-erotic, ethical poetics of these two lyric precursors. While Dante had previously sought to grant love poetry greater moral viability (in the Vita nova) and depth of meaning (in the lengthy prose commentaries and allegorical canzoni of Convivio II and III), these doctrinal canzoni see him pursue a 102 104 105

103 De Robertis, Rime, p. 53. Pernicone, ‘Poscia ch’Amor’, pp. 615–16. See, especially, Fenzi, ‘ “Sollazzo” e “leggiadria” ’, pp. 274–80. Picone, ‘Giraut de Bornelh’, p. 27.

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different objective. They are important poems in terms of Dante’s poetic development, particularly in their use of lexical asprezza and poetry as an ethical and discursive tool, yet they constitute an anomalous moment in his oeuvre. Indeed, it will prove highly significant that Guittone and Giraut, who serve as key models for Dante here, are bracketed together in Purgatorio XXVI, deemed subordinate to Arnaut and Guinizzelli, as Dante revives the love lyric as a privileged mode of vernacular expression. ‘Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire’ [Grief brings boldness to my heart], cited in the De vulgari as the finest example of moral poetry in the Italian vernacular (DVE II, i, 9), almost certainly dates to the first two years of Dante’s exile,106 and is among the richest and most important of the Rime. It is, states Pernicone, ‘più propriamente morale che dottrinale’ [more properly moral than doctrinal].107 It does not simply define and delineate a particular virtue or quality, but has a directness and personal charge, aiming to make its readers—to use Cacciaguida’s famous words in the Paradiso—‘grattar dov’è la rogna’ [scratch where they feel an itch] (Par. XVII, 129). Even more than the ‘doctrinal’ canzoni, ‘Doglia mi reca’ also enjoys a complex relationship with Guittone, with both the debts to and the divergence from the Aretine poet noticeably more pronounced. Barolini,108 Foster and Boyde, and De Robertis have all noted Guittonian elements in ‘Doglia mi reca’, stylistic, structural, and ideological.109 The stylistic presence of Guittone is most prominent in its fourth stanza: Chi è servo è come quello ch’è seguace ratto a segnore, e non sa dove vada, per dolorosa strada: come l’avaro seguitando avere, ch’a tutti segnoreggia. Corre l’avaro, ma più fugge pace: oh mente cieca, che non pò vedere lo suo folle volere

106 See Foster-Boyde, II, 296; Contini, Rime, p. 462. Contini suggests that the ‘Contessa Bianca Giovanna’ of the congedo is probably the daughter of Guido Novello, who lived in Siena and whom Dante could have known in the early period of his exile. The canzone is also closely linked structurally to the exilic ‘Tre donne’. 107 Pernicone, ‘Le prime rime dottrinali’, p. 505. 108 Barolini’s important work on this canzone is far-reaching (see ‘Anatomy of desire’; ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’; ‘Sotto benda’), and my discussion here is indebted to it. Where I hope to build upon Barolini’s work in this section is by showing how ‘Doglia mi reca’ acts as the culmination of Dante’s journey as a moral lyricist before the Commedia—a journey in which I believe he constantly refines his praxis in close dialogue with Guittone. 109 On the structural affinities between ‘Doglia mi reca’ and the canzoni of Guittone, see P. Boyde, ‘Style and Structure in Dante’s canzone “Doglia mi reca” ’, IS, 20 (1965), 26–41 (pp. 33–6).

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che ’l numero, ch’ognora a passar bada, che ’nfinito vaneggia. Ecco giunta colei che ne pareggia: dimmi, che hai tu fatto, cieco avaro disfatto? Rispondimi, se puoi, altro che ‘Nulla’. Maladetta tua culla, che lusingò cotanti sonni invano; maladetto lo tuo perduto pane, che non si perde al cane: ché da sera e da mane hai raunato e stretto ad ambo mano ciò che sí tosto si rifà lontano. (49, 64–84) [A man so enslaved is like someone following headlong after his master along a painful road without knowing where he goes; like a miser following riches, the master of all. The miser runs, only to be ever further away from peace. O blinded mind, for its insane desire cannot see that the sum which every moment it strives to pass stretches on to empty infinity! See, the one who makes us all equal has come. Tell me, what have you done, blind, undone miser? Answer me—if you can—other than ‘Nothing’. Cursed be your cradle which beguiled so many dreams in vain; cursed be the bread you’ve wasted, that’s not wasted on a dog; for evening and morning you have gathered and hoarded with both hands that which so quickly slips from your grasp.]

Numerous aspects of these lines call to mind Guittone’s attack on avarice in ‘Ora parrà’, most notably its own fourth stanza. Each poet switches his attention to the theme of avarice, having previously decried lust: two branches of the cupiditas they seek to condemn. Like Guittone’s ‘cupid’ om’, Dante’s ‘avaro’ is trapped in a vicious circle of self-defeating and irrational desire.110 Each figure blindly directs himself towards an unattainable goal, unwittingly consumed by a desire he mistakes for freedom. Like Guittone, Dante describes this condition through the use of antithesis. The opening lines describe a miser enslaved by his avaricious yearning, whose material wealth is desperately at odds with his intellectual and spiritual poverty. In particular, this avaro calls to mind the imagery used to describe Guittone’s miser, who, ‘credendo venir ricco’, likewise becomes spiritually bankrupt (‘ven mendico’). Guittonian rhetoric also abounds in Dante’s second stanza: Omo da sé vertú fatto ha lontana: omo no, mala bestia ch’om simiglia. 110 This recalls the ‘erroneo camminatore’ of Convivio IV, xii, 19, who looks ahead with ‘occhi gulosi’.

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[Men have cut themselves off from virtue—no, not men, but evil beasts in man’s likeness. O God, how strange—to choose to fall from master to slave, from life to death!]

These oppositions all describe the folly of overestimating the worth of worldly pleasures to the detriment of one’s spiritual well-being, using precisely the kind of opposition (vita/morte; signore/servo) that fuels much of Guittone’s ethical poetry. Both poets use antithesis to describe the duplicity of worldly temptations; their potential to ensnare and enslave while appearing to liberate and entertain. They also focus on the generic ‘omo’, on the universal in place of the particular. Despite these parallels, however, ‘Doglia mi reca’ at times possesses a vibrancy and rhetorical diversity that Guittone’s didactic poetry lacks. For example, while Dante begins his fourth stanza with a rather Guittonian ‘Chi’, his register later shifts to the second person (lines 75–84), foreshadowing the caustic bite of the Commedia’s great invectives.111 In this respect, there is a vital development in Dante’s poetry from the ‘doctrinal’ canzoni to ‘Doglia mi reca’. In ‘Le dolci rime’, we saw Dante state the need for ‘rima aspr’e sottile’: a more demanding register to match his weightier theme. As discussed by Foster and Boyde, his approach here in ‘Doglia mi reca’ is less rigid and more inclusive.112 Rather than switching mechanically to the ethical materia, adopting the customary register of the doctrinal poems, Dante draws upon different registers, voices, and techniques—a first step towards the plurilingualism of the Commedia. Guittone’s distinctly ‘closed’ style wilfully eschews such directness. For Scott Millspaugh, this style follows the trobar clus of the ethical troubadour Macabru in excluding readers who lack the requisite moral qualities and protecting the virtue embedded in his verse—a textual strategy that Millspaugh sees as fundamentally at odds with the Commedia’s metaphysics of language and the harmony between signifier and signified it endorses.113 If the style and rhetoric of ‘Doglia mi reca’ draw upon Guittone’s moral verse, but ultimately departs from it, much the same can be said for 111

Barolini argues that ‘the force and vitality of this strophe alert us to the fact that Dante has here tapped into a wellspring of his poetic identity’ (‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 61). 112 On the broad lexical field of the poem, see Foster-Boyde, II, 296–7. ‘The features which distinguish the style of this poem are those which characterize the utterances of an angry man’ (p. 297). 113 ‘No wonder, then, that Dante would indict the difficult poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo: from a metaphysical point of view, its complexity obfuscates its meaning, or worse, its meaning is generated by way of deliberate obfuscation’ (Millspaugh, p. 4).

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the canzone’s ideology. In tracing the roots of the Commedia’s ‘anatomy of desire’, Barolini has shown important ideological parallels between ‘Doglia mi reca’ and Guittone’s ‘Ora Parrà’, arguing that Guittone’s radical critique of the courtly ethos, especially its conflation of lust with avarice as sins of immoderate desire, informs not only ‘Doglia mi reca’, but also Dante’s masterpiece.114 She rightly stresses that the canzoni should be understood as attacks not against the specific sins of lust and avarice, but against the moral perils of cupiditas, and that, in its critique of the courtly ethos, ‘Ora parrà’ plainly foreshadows Dante’s poem. As Barolini notes in a separate essay, however, ‘Doglia mi reca’ and ‘Ora parrà’ (as well as Guittone’s other palinodic canzoni) also display important differences in their handling of human love,115 as the ideological disjuncture we traced in the first part of the chapter crucially re-emerges. Let us consider the opening stanza of Dante’s poem: Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire a voler ch’è di veritate amico: però, donne, s’io dico parole quasi contra tutta gente, non vi maravigliate ma conoscete il vil vostro disire; che la beltà ch’Amore in voi consente, a vertù solamente formata fu dal suo decreto antico, contra ’l qual voi fallate. Io dico a voi che siete innamorate che, se vertute a noi fu data, e beltà a voi, e a costui di due potere un fare, voi non dovreste amare, ma coprir quanto di biltà v’è dato, poi che non c’è vertú, ch’era suo segno. Lasso, a che dicer vegno? Dico che bel disdegno sarebbe in donna, di ragion laudato, partir beltà da sé per suo commiato. (49, 1–21) [Grief brings boldness to my heart on behalf of a desire that is friend to truth. If then, ladies, I speak against almost everyone, do not wonder at this, but recognize the baseness of your inclinations: for the beauty that Love concedes to you was created solely for virtue, according to his original decree, against which you are sinning. I say to you, women who are in love, that if virtue was granted to us, and 114 115

See Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’; Foster-Boyde, II, 296. See Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, pp. 93–7.

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beauty to you, and to Love the power to make of two things one, then you should love no more, but rather hide the beauty given you, since virtue, that was its goal, is found no more. Alas, what am I brought to say? I say it would be an act of fine scorn in a woman, and rightly praised, to sever beauty from herself—herself bidding it farewell.]

Dante is moved to write by a grief born out of his disenchantment with a world bereft of virtue. Like the verse of Fra Guittone, ‘Doglia mi reca’ expresses an anxiety towards contemporary amatory values. There is, however, a crucial difference between their approaches. Fra Guittone, of course, constructs an emphatic opposition between lust and reason that underpins his moral conversion, and attaches to Amor only negative connotations. A cursory glance at ‘Doglia mi reca’ might suggest a similar dichotomy: the opening lines see Dante attack the ‘vil . . . disire’ [base inclinations] of women who allow themselves to be loved by unvirtuous men, and, rather than attacking the erroneous few, Dante speaks out ‘quasi contra tutta gente’ [against almost everybody]. Yet Dante’s indignation is not towards Amor itself, but towards a contemporary distortion of a positive ideal. The reason why the virtuous woman should sever beauty from herself—‘partir beltà da sé’ (line 21)—is that, in an age bereft of virtue, beauty and Amor have no place. Dante argues that love, far from being opposed to virtue, is inherently connected to it. Female beauty is a reward for male virtue, and the two together form the precious gift of Amor, as formulated by the poet in lines 6–14. Love is thus the hallowed fusion of beauty and virtue: ‘di due potere un fare’ [to make of two things one].116 Love here has a crucially different status than in Guittone’s moral verse. For Fra Guittone, one must renounce love in order to attain virtue, while in ‘Doglia mi reca’ one must attain virtue in order to espouse love. Dante attacks women who are ‘innamorate’, not because love represents moral transgression, but because, through allowing themselves to be loved by cupidinous men, they undermine Amor: in the crucial terms 116 Barolini’s ‘Sotto benda’ argues that ‘Doglia mi reca’ attempts to destroy the gender dualities of the courtly lyric. Women here cease to be remote, passive donne and acquire a moral agency in a way that prefigures Piccarda and Francesca in the Commedia. Barolini (pp. 352–9) again shows Guittone to be an important precursor here, himself having defended women in the canzoni ‘Ahi lasso che li boni e li malvagi’ and ‘Altra fiata’: ‘Guittone’s pragmatic concern with the utility of his writing for women leads directly to Dante’s Doglia mi reca, which in turn paves the way for the Commedia, whose figures are not courtly icons but live and breathe the air of history’ (p. 359). Tellingly, however, while ‘Doglia mi reca’ encourages women to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lovers, Guittone’s canzoni ‘simply exhort women to remain chaste at all costs, for even death is better than unchastity’ (p. 356).

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of the final stanza, they are guilty of calling love what is, in fact, bestial appetite (lines 43):117 che se beltà tra i mali volemo annumerar, creder si pòne, chiamando amore appetito di fera. Oh cotal donna pera che sua biltà dischiera da natural bontà per tal cagione, e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione.

(49, 141–7)

[If we choose to number beauty among evils, then that belief is possible, provided one gives the name ‘love’ to bestial appetite! O death to the woman who for such a pretext sunders her beauty from natural goodness, believing that love can be found outside the garden of reason!]

This is the crux of the poets’ divergence: love in ‘Doglia mi reca’, foreshadowing the philosophy of the Commedia, is precisely what Guittone, like Cavalcanti, claims it cannot be: rational. While, for the Aretine, ‘l’omo perde in [Amor] discrezione / e la razionale operazione’ [man loses in love discretion and rational operation] (XXVIII, 48–9), for Dante the opposite is true. Love, wholly distinct from lust, is a hallmark of virtue, rectitude, and the deployment of the rational soul. Without reason and virtue, what purports to be love can only be ‘appetito di fera’. As Barolini summarizes: ‘Dante is elaborating an analysis of desire that anticipates the Commedia in its move away from the dualistic courtly paradigm toward a unified Aristotelian template’—one where desire is not condemned, but becomes a life force; where love possesses redemptive as well as destructive potential.118 Thus, as moral poets, like as love poets, Dante and Guittone come to delineate the status of desire and its relationship to reason in decisively different terms. Just as he did in the Vita nova, Dante redefines Amor, again welding it to reason and transcending the binaries that restrict his aspirations as a vernacular moral poet. In its stylistic elasticity and ideology, ‘Doglia mi reca’ thus acts as a crucial stepping-stone from the ‘canzoni dottrinali’ and ‘Due donne’ to the Commedia. ‘Doglia mi reca’ is clearly poetry of rectitude, and one could argue that—despite the presence of an amorous congedo—lyric desire is not yet successfully 117 As Barolini notes, this paves the way for the Commedia’s Francesca: ‘Francesca, although she may use the word amore . . . misapplies the signifier, for the impulse that grips her is in fact an “appetito di fera”. Her mistake comes from the fact that she believes that love is disjoined from reason; literally, she “believes love to be outside reason’s garden” ’: Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, p. 95. 118 Barolini, ‘Sotto benda’, p. 344.

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integrated; yet its tentative thematic fusion nonetheless anticipates the Commedia.119 Dante now incorporates lyric discourse into a moral canzone. He seeks a fresh equilibrium between erotic and spiritual commitment, which, in the intervening years, had often been plotted against one another. While the shadow of Guittone certainly looms, this is where Dante the ‘cantor rectitudinis’ finds his own voice, absorbing aspects of his precursor’s work while formulating a distinctive poetics. More than any of Dante’s Italian precursors, it was Guittone who anticipated the Florentine’s transition from amatory to moral content as a lyric poet. Yet it is simplistic to regard Dante’s anxiety at this fact as the principal motivation for his hostility towards his predecessor. Dante pays close attention to Guittone’s clear and distinctive model of conversion, but we have seen in this chapter that Dante saw it as unsatisfactory, and ultimately follows a very different poetic and spiritual path. Dante regards Fra Guittone’s poetry as a reactionary reassertion of the moral-poetic choice, between the lady and God, that had confronted and fettered vernacular poets for the previous ‘cento e cinquanta anni’ [one hundred and fifty years] (VN XXV, 4). If Dante’s is a poetics of integration, Guittone’s is a poetry of separation. Justin Steinberg writes that ‘for both Guittone and Fra Guittone, there exists a natural vertical ordering to the universe, expressed in the inviolable divisions between heaven and earth, sacred and profane, the Virgin and the beloved, man and woman, animate and inanimate’.120 In the Commedia, ‘il poema sacro / cui pose mano e cielo e terra’ [the sacred poem, to which heaven and earth have set their hand] (Par. XXV, 1–2), each of these oppositions is challenged and nuanced. By orientating his love towards Beatrice in the Commedia, Dante incorporates eros into his ‘sacred poem’ in a manner unthinkable to his predecessor. What I aim to have shown in tracing Dante’s negotiation of Guittone through the minor works is that his eventual syncretism with respect to love, as delineated in Chapter 2, is not only un-Guittonian in its nature, but specifically anti-Guittonian in its conception. The theory of love at the core of the Commedia forcefully rebuts the fatalism of those ‘ciechi’ [blind ones] (Purg. XVIII, 18) who regard love and reason as inherently conflictual (‘Onde, poniam che di

119 Much the same can be said of Dante’s great post-exilic canzone on justice, ‘Tre donne’ (c.1304), which I do not discuss in detail since it appears to engage much less with Guittone. It is, however, a vital moment in Dante’s lyric development, beautifully balancing the subjective and the universal, the lyrical and the ethical. While the dishevelled woman at its heart is a configuration of Giustizia, the poem possesses a poignancy and lyricism that transcends the more rigid approach to allegory found in the Convivio’s first two canzoni. 120 Steinberg, p. 43.

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necessitate / surga ogne amor che dentro a voi s’accende / di ritenerlo è in voi la podestate’ [Let us posit as a given: every love that’s kindled in you arises necessarily. Still, the power to restrain it lies within you]: Purg. XVIII, 70–2).121 In contrast with what Francesca tells us in Inferno V, we learn that all love can—and must—exist in harmony with reason. The foremost among these ‘ciechi’ is almost certainly Cavalcanti: Roberto Antonelli and Donatella Stocchi Perucchio have persuasively argued that the scholastic argumentation of these cantos constitutes a riposte to the theory expounded in ‘Donna me prega’.122 But implicated too is surely Guittone: a longstanding ideological adversary whose corpus pivots upon the conviction that love inevitably incapacitates ‘la razionale operazione’ [our rational operation]. As alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, it is in Purgatorio XXVI that the Commedia’s rejection of a Guittonian poetics is confirmed. At stake in this episode, as I shall argue in Chapter 4, is much more than poetic style. His exaltation of the love poets Guinizzelli and Arnaut reflects his own fresh allegiance to love, while his denigration of Guittone and Giraut recants his former adherence to a non-erotic, Guittonian poetics in the period of the doctrinal canzoni, where he assumed the mantle of ‘cantor rectiduinis’ in the mould of these precursors.123 Whatever the precise valence of the term ‘Amor’ in the crucial self-definition of Purgatorio XXIV (‘I’ mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto’ [I am one who, when love inspires me, takes note]: Purg. XXIV, 52–3), there can be no doubt that Dante emphasizes not a rupture between his activity as the ‘cantor amoris’ of the Vita nova and as the ‘scriba dei’ of the Commedia, but 121

As Barolini has shown, this theory picks up where ‘Doglia mi reca’ left off, presenting human desire on a continuum: see ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, pp. 95–6. 122 See R. Antonelli, ‘Cavalcanti e Dante: Al di qua del Paradiso’, in Dante: Da Firenze all’aldilà (Florence: Cesati, 2000), pp. 289–302; D. Stocchi-Perucchio, ‘The Knot of Cavalcanti in the “Commedia”: A Few Threads’, in Ardizzone, ed., Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, pp. 213–40. 123 Picone similarly states that the Purgatorio hosts ‘il pieno recupero (e la sublimazione) della concezione dell’amor propria della Vita Nuova e l’esaltazione dei modelli che avevano contribuito all’estrinsecazione di tale ideologia (Guido Guinizzelli e Arnaut Daniel), e dall’altro il completo abbandono dell’accezione filosofica della virtus elaborata nella produzione allegorico-morale e la sconfessione del modello giraldiano’ [the full recovery and sublimation of the Vita nova’s conception of love and the exaltation of the poetic models which had contributed to the elaboration of that ideology (Guinizzelli and Arnaut), as well as the complete abandonment of the philosophical mode developed in the moral and allegorical lyrics and the rejection of Giraut] (‘Giraut de Bornelh’, p. 43). I hope to have shown here that, as well as the ‘modello giraldiano’, Dante rejects the ‘modello guittoniano’. Others argue that Arnaut is raised above Giraut simply on account of his stylistic influence upon Dante—a view I challenge in Chapter 4: see Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria’, pp. 1056–65; M. Perugi, ‘Arnaut Daniel in Dante’, SD, 51 (1978), 59–152 (p. 106); G. Toja, introduction to Arnaut Daniel, Canzoni (Florence: Sansoni, 1960), p. 84.

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rather a continuity, which—in its syncretism, its complexity, its audacity— is antithetical to the binary construction of Guittone’s corpus and his converted posture as ‘omo d’Amor non punto’ [a man not pierced by love]. The Commedia sees arid moralizing rejected and love poetry revivified and redeemed—a return to the Vita nova’s (anti-Guittonian) conviction that vernacular poetry and love must be indissolubly linked.

4 Arnaut Daniel Having explored how Dante negotiates and discards the dualistic Guittonian solution to the moral tension at the heart of the vernacular love lyric, I shall consider in this chapter his treatment of Arnaut Daniel, a poet whose commitment to erotic love, in contrast with Guittone’s, is unflinching.1 Arnaut was active as a poet in the second half of the twelfth century. His verse is composed in Occitan and almost exclusively concerns love.2 He is especially noted among the troubadours for his technical innovation, and was probably the inventor of the sestina form later adopted by Dante and Petrarch.3 Given the problematic status of conventional courtly poetry throughout Dante’s oeuvre, we might expect his judgement of Arnaut to be as unequivocally disapproving as his judgement of Guittone, who—for all his ideological and stylistic flaws—at least confronted the lyric tradition’s inherent moral difficulties. Intriguingly, however, his evaluation of Arnaut is far more positive. While his legacy in the work of Dante has ensured that his poetry has received much critical attention, Arnaut the man, like many troubadours,

1 Citations of Arnaut’s poetry are taken from Le canzoni di Arnaut Daniel, ed. by M. Perugi (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1978). Unless otherwise stated, translations are from The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel, ed. and trans. by J. Wilhelm (New York: Garland, 1981). 2 Of his eighteen extant compositions, seventeen are erotic. The other—‘Pois Raimonz e Truc Malecs’ (I)—is a bawdy sirventes. There is nothing to suggest this latter poem was known by Dante. 3 On the development of the sestina form in all three poets, see S. Battaglia, Le rime petrose e la sestina: Arnaldo Daniello, Dante, Petrarch (Naples: Liguori, 1964). Petrarch, like Dante, admired Arnaut’s distinct poetic voice, describing the troubadour as ‘gran maestro d’amor, ch’a la sua terra / ancor fa onor, col suo dir strano e bello’ [a great master of love, who in his land is still honoured for his strange and beautiful language] (Triumphus Cupidinis, IV, 41–2): cited from Francesco Petrarca, Rime, trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. by F. Neri, G. Martellotti, and E. Bianchi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1951). His influence endured into the twentieth century, particularly among the modernists: Ezra Pound wrote an essay on the poet he deemed ‘the best fashioner of song in the Provençal’, while T. S. Eliot refers to Pound as ‘miglior fabbro’ in his foreword to ‘The Waste Land’: see E. Pound, ‘Arnaud Daniel’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), pp. 109–48 (p. 109); T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 53.

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remains ‘a vague and shadowy figure’.4 The most detailed contemporary biographical document we possess is his brief vida, included in various Occitan and Italian chansonniers: Arnautz Daniels si fo d’aquella encontrada don do N’Arnautz de Maruoill, de l’evescat de Peiregors, d’un chastel que a nom Ribairac; e fo gentils hom. Et amparet ben letras e fetz se ioglars, e deleitet se en trobar en caras rimas, per que las soas chanssos non son leus ad entendre ni ad aprendre. Et amet una auta dompna de Gascoigna, moiller d’En Guillem de Bouvila, mas non fo crezut que anc la dompna li fezes plazer en dreich d’amor; per que el ditz: ‘Eu sui Arnautz q’amas l’aura / e catz la lebre ab lo bou / e nadi contra suberna’.5 [Arnaut came from the same area as Arnaut de Mareuil—the region of Périgord—from a town named Ribérac, and he was a nobleman. He was a man of letters and became a jongleur and delighted in composing caras rimas; thus, his songs are not easy to understand. He loved a noblewoman from Gascony, but it is believed that the woman did not love him in return; thus, the poet says, ‘I am Arnaut, who hoards the wind, and chases the rabbit with the ox, and swims against the swelling tide.’]

Vidas like this should be approached with some caution. We should be mindful, to quote Gianluigi Toja, of their ‘convenzionalismo e la loro abituale mescolanza di verità e invenzione’ [conventional nature and tendency to mix fact and fiction].6 We learn here, nonetheless, that Arnaut was born in the Périgord town of Ribérac and loved a Gascon noblewoman, while the phrase ‘amparet ben letras’ suggests that he was well educated—a notion reinforced by the rhetorical sophistication of his poetry.7 The author also offers an aesthetic appraisal of Arnaut’s poetry: namely, that the troubadour’s lyrics were not easy to understand (‘leus ad entendre’), since he used complex and difficult rhymes (‘caras rimas’). Much of Arnaut’s modern renown inevitably derives from his importance to Dante.8 Having initially been no more than a minor influence 4 A. R. Press, in Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, ed. by A. R. Press (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 173. On the scarce details we have concerning Arnaut’s life, see Wilhelm’s introduction to The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel, pp. xi–xvii. 5 Cited from Toja, ed., Canzoni, pp. 165–6. Translation my own. 6 Toja, Canzoni, p. 12 (my translation). 7 Toja (Canzoni, p. 12) suggests that Arnaut was perhaps destined to be a clericus before dedicating himself to love poetry. 8 Important contributions on Arnaut and Dante include: S. Asperti, ‘Dante, i trovatori, la poesia’, in Picone et al., eds, Le culture di Dante, pp. 61–92 (esp. pp. 81–9); Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 96–100, 112–14, and 176–9; P. Beltrami, ‘Arnaut Daniel e la “bella scola” dei trovatori di Dante’, in Picone et al., eds, Le culture di Dante, pp. 29–59; T. G. Bergin, ‘Dante’s Provençal Gallery’, in A Diversity of Dante (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), pp. 87–111; Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria’; P. E. Bondanella, ‘Arnaut Daniel and Dante’s Rime Petrose: A Re-Examination’, Studies in Philology, 68

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upon the Florentine,9 the troubadour comes to occupy a privileged place in his estimation. He is cited four times in the De vulgari eloquentia, while in the Purgatorio he is described as ‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ (Purg. XXVI, 117)—the finest craftsman of the mother tongue—and granted the striking honour of speaking in his native Occitan. The troubadour’s clear formal and stylistic influence upon Dante, above all in the ‘harsh’ linguistic register and intricate poetic forms of the ‘rime petrose’, was a decisive and liberating one, freeing him from the lexical and phonic restrictions that the ‘stilnovo’ had purposely imposed, and helping him to convey—in Contini’s words—‘il reale nella sua istante fisicità, corposità e asprezza’ [reality in all its physicality, corporeity, and harshness].10 It is tempting to restrict Arnaut’s significance to this technical sphere; the term ‘fabbro’ might encourage us to view him simply as a poetic artificer, an uninspired technician. Dante scholars in particular, while seldom engaging closely with Arnaut’s poetry beyond its formal properties, repeatedly stress that its salient feature is its adherence to the trobar clus, a hermetic style of lyric poetry—opposed to the limpid trobar leu— (1971), 416–34; M. Bowra, ‘Dante and Arnaut Daniel’, Speculum, 27 (1952), 459–74; B. Burgwinkle, ‘Modern Lovers: Evanescence and the Act in Dante, Arnaut and Sordello’, in Gragnolati et al., eds, Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, pp. 14–28; F. Coassin, ‘ “El cominciò liberamente a dire”: Liberalità e libertà del poeta: La lezione di Arnaut’, in Flinders Dante Conferences: 2002 & 2004, ed. by M. Baker, F. Coassin, and D. Glenn (Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2005), pp. 38–50; G. Contini, ‘Premessa a un’edizione di Arnaut Daniel’, in Varianti e altra linguistica: una raccolta di saggi (1958–1968) (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 311–17; C. De Lollis, ‘Arnaldo e Guittone’, in Scrittori d’Italia, ed. by G. Contini and C. Santoli (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1968), pp. 3–20; M. Marti, ‘Il XXVI del Purgatorio’; M. Mocoan, ‘Ulisse, Arnaut e Riccardo di San Vittore: convergenze figurali e richiami lessicali nella Commedia’, Lettere italiane, LVII (2005), 173–208; Perugi; Picone, ‘Vita nuova’ e tradizione romanza, pp. 32–9; B. Porcelli, ‘Il canto XXVI e la poesia del “Purgatorio” ’, in Studi sulla ‘Divina Commedia’ (Bologna: Patron, 1970), pp. 49–84; M. Shapiro, ‘Purgatorio XXX: Arnaut at the Summit’, DS, 100 (1982), 71–6; N. B. Smith, ‘Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio: Dante’s Ambivalence toward Provençal’, DS, 98 (1980), 99–109; Toja, ed., Canzoni, pp. 65–106; J. Wilhelm, ‘Arnaut Daniel’s Legacy to Dante and to Pound’, in Roots and Branches: Essays in Honour of Thomas Goddard Bergin, ed. by G. Rimanelli and K. J. Atchity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 67–83, and ‘What Dante May Have Learned from Arnaut Daniel’, in Dante: Summa Medievalis: Proceedings of the Symposium of the Centre for Italian Studies, SUNY, Stony Brook, ed. by C. Franco and L. Morgan (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1995), pp. 87–99; D. Yowell, ‘ “Trop Amar” vs. “Ben Amar”: Redemptive Love in Arnaut Daniel and Dante’, Romance Philology, 42 (1989), no. 4, 385–95. 9 Perugi (pp. 60–8) notes echoes of Arnaut in the Detto d’amore, attributable to Dante. He stresses, however, that the appropriation of Arnaut at this stage is essentially a superficial one, ignoring the distinctive features of the troubadour’s poetry which would later prove important. 10 Contini, ‘Premessa’, p. 315 (my translation). Perugi argues that a precedent to Arnaut’s influence in the ‘petrose’ comes in the early canzone ‘Lo doloroso amore’ [The sorrowful love], where more intricate echoes of the troubadour’s poetry seem to appear for the first time. See Perugi, pp. 69–74; on Arnaut in the ‘petrose’, see Perugi, pp. 74–80.

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associated with certain twelfth-century Occitan poets, such as Macabru and Raimbaut d’Aurenga.11 This perspective is perhaps informed by the vida’s assertion that Arnaut’s poems were not ‘leus ad entendre’, which implicitly frames the difficulty of his verse in terms of a leu/clus opposition. Indeed, dantisti claim not only that Arnaut was an indulgent obscurantist, but that Dante also understood him as such. This view is substantiated with reference to two features of the troubadour’s Occitan speech in the Purgatorio, which are interpreted as a recantation of his former use of the trobar clus: first, it is claimed that the language of the speech, in contrast with the difficulty of Arnaut’s poetry, is plain (leu) in style; second, the line ‘qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire’ [I neither can nor would conceal myself from you] (Purg. XXVI, 142) is construed as an expression of regret for the poet’s adherence to trobar clus poetics—‘an acknowledgement of the sinful error of the self-indulgent hermetic poetry that he had written on earth’.12 While Michelangelo Picone and Teodolinda Barolini have stressed, in the context of wider studies, that Arnaut’s significance to Dante goes beyond his technical achievements,13 a perception of Arnaut as a talented yet contrived and indulgent formalist remains the unquestioned norm.14

11 The terms trobar clus and trobar leu have prompted much critical debate. See, for example, M.-A. Bossy, ‘The trobar clus of Raimbaut d’Aurenga, Giraut de Bornelh and Arnaut Daniel’, Medievalia, 19 (1996), 203–19; C. di Girolamo, ‘Trobar clus e trobar leu’, Medioevo Romanzo, 8 (1983), 11–35; Millspaugh; U. Mölk, Trobar Clus, trobar leu (Munich: W. Fink, 1968); L. M. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 31–52; A. Roncaglia, ‘Trobar clus: discussione aperta’, Cultura Neolatina, 29 (1969), 5–51; J. Wilhelm, ‘The “Closed Troubadours” and Dante: Varieties of Medieval Hermeticism’, in Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. by A. Balakian and J. Wilhelm, 3 vols (New York: Garland, 1985), II, 587–91. 12 Barański, ‘’nfiata labbia’, p. 31. This idea was introduced by Sapegno in his 1957 commentary on the Commedia: ‘al ripudio delle passioni mondane (la passada folor) s’accompagna . . . il rifiuto anche di un gusto già caro di rime arcane e chiuse (ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire)’ [the rejection of worldly passions is accompanied by his rejection of an arcane and closed style]: N. Sapegno, in Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. and with a commentary by N. Sapegno (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957), p. 696. 13 Picone believes Arnaut’s importance to Dante is due to his status as the first vernacular poet ‘che formula con grande chiarezza il tema dell’identificazione di amore e poesia’ [who develops with great clarity the theme of a close identification between love and poetry] (‘La tradizione romanza’, p. 39), while Barolini claims that Arnaut’s verse displays ‘an intensity of amorous commitment that prefigures Dante’s own’ (Dante’s Poets, p. 113). Although Picone’s and Barolini’s arguments to a certain extent foreshadow my own, neither critic’s analysis takes the form of a sustained study, nor looks closely at Arnaut’s poetry. 14 Typical objections towards Arnaut’s poetry are voiced in Bergin’s study of Dante and the troubadours: ‘It is not easy to understand Dante’s admiration for a poet who seems very often wilfully obscure and exhibitionistic, and, in sheer substance, either incomprehensible or platitudinous’: p. 94. Beltrami (pp. 37–8) cites a selection of lukewarm twentiethcentury responses to Arnaut’s poetry.

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I believe, however, that this conventional reading of Arnaut’s legacy and his appearance in the Commedia is a problematic one, and that an excessive and at times misplaced emphasis upon the trobar clus has contributed to a simplistic understanding of his poetry. While the scholarly trope of Arnaut as ‘the major practitioner of the . . . trobar clus’15 implies that his verse strives to obscure meaning in a conventional or prescribed manner, I aim in this chapter to go beyond a narrowly stylistic response to Arnaut’s poetry and to consider his significance to Dante as a staunch and distinctive poet of erotic love, whose profound identification with Amor tallied with Dante’s notion of what lyric poetry in the vernacular ought to be. Far from critiquing its indulgence, I shall suggest that Dante saw Arnaut’s unusual style as an important attempt to overcome the conventional incongruity between subjective desire and poetic language— an incongruity perpetuated by the stylistic tropes that Arnaut so pointedly rejected. 4.1 ARNAUT’S POETICS OF DESIRE The category of trobar clus requires more careful examination than it has tended to receive from Dante scholars, not least in relation to Arnaut. It should first be stressed that while it is clear that some troubadours, including Arnaut, adopt a deliberately ‘difficult’ style, the prevalence of the term trobar clus in modern scholarship distorts the extent of its prominence in the later Middle Ages. It appears infrequently in troubadour poetry, and is never defined in any sort of poetic treatise. Indeed, the evidence upon which critics long relied for an insight into the ‘style’—the tenso between Giraut de Bornelh and Raimbaut d’Aurenga, in which the poets defend the trobar leu and trobar clus respectively—has been seen by a number of leading scholars of Occitan poetry as parodic or ironic in intent.16 While critics have toiled to establish some sort of empirical definition of this vexed term, the discrepancy between their conclusions evinces the difficulty of such a task. As scholars have increasingly stressed, the various 15 P. Hainsworth, ‘Arnaut Daniel’, in The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, ed. by P. Hainsworth and D. Robey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 32. Countless other critics and commentators describe Arnaut in practically identical terms. 16 See S. Gaunt and J. Marshall, ‘Occitan Grammars and the Art of Troubadour Poetry’, in Minnis and Johnson, eds, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, pp. 472–95 (pp. 480–1); S. Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 167–78; S. Kay, ‘Rhetoric and Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry’, in The Troubadours and the Epic: Essays in Memory of W. Mary Hacket, ed. by L. M. Paterson and S. B. Gaunt (Coventry: University of Warwick, 1987), pp. 102–42 (pp. 125–9).

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categories of trobar so beloved of modern critics are better regarded as pigeonholes into which poets have been retrospectively lumped than coherent ‘schools’ of troubadour poetry.17 Moreover, contrary to the claims of Dante critics, troubadour scholars who have considered the extent to which Arnaut’s poetry pertains to the trobar clus have often concluded that it does not; that—on the contrary— the poet ‘does not fit neatly into one pattern and is in fact extraordinary for his diversity’.18 Insofar as the trobar clus can be defined, troubadour scholars associate it principally with earlier moralizing poets seeking an elite audience.19 In her study of the troubadours’ stylistic terminology, Linda Paterson concludes that it can be ‘characterized by the gradual unfolding of the razo, as the poet clarifies his state of mind or some difficult thought’.20 Arnaut’s poetry, conversely, is seldom characterized either by complexity of thought or conceptual ‘unfolding’ (an exception comes in the sestina ‘Lo ferm voler’) and its content is staunchly erotic. While other troubadours adopting particular ‘styles’ are seen to allude to this fact, however obliquely, Arnaut himself never mentions the trobar clus, nor does he enter into the debates concerning poetic style that occur elsewhere in the troubadour corpus. Flavia Coassin even goes as far as to claim that Arnaut was ‘è l’unico poeta a non aver mai partecipato a dibattiti poetici’ [the one troubadour never to have participated in poetic debates].21 Arnaut’s refusal to associate himself with a particular ‘style’ is important, for it crucially reflects his desire to show that ‘above all . . . he is inspired by love’.22 A leitmotif across his corpus is the link between the 17 Sarah Kay writes: ‘It is disappointing to ardent Germans eager to locate the clus style somewhere in the lofty realms of Biblical exegesis, ornatus difficilis or Arabic poetics to be told something not unlike Buffon’s famous “le style, c’est l’homme même” ’: Kay, ‘Rhetoric’, pp. 125–6. And Bossy: ‘Modern scholars hopelessly struggle to sort out methodically the varieties of troubadour obscurity and hermeticism, but the terminology used by the troubadours themselves to discuss their aesthetic intentions and achievements is, in fact, dizzyingly variable’ (p. 204). On the difference between trobar clus and trobar leu, Coassin states: ‘Non sempre è facile distinguere tra l’uno e l’altro stile . . . , gli stessi poeti potevano usare ambedue gli stili, e inoltre, da un paragone tra esponenti dichiarati dell’uno e l’altro stile, capita non di rado di trovare maggiori difficoltà d’interpretazione nelle liriche cosiddette leu’ [often it is not easy to distinguish between one style and the other . . . the same poets could use both styles and, furthermore, when we compare declared exponents of the two styles, it is often harder to interpret the lyrics of the supposedly leu poets] (p. 42). 18 Wilhelm, Introduction to The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel, p. xvii. See also Bossy; Di Girolamo, ‘Trobar clus e trobar leu’; Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, pp. 190–201. 19 See Gaunt and Marshall, p. 479. Di Girolamo links the trobar clus solely to Macabru’s moral poetry: ‘Come corrente poetica, il trobar clus si ridurrebbe a ben poca cosa, a volere assumere la poetica di Macabru’ [As a poetic trend, the trobar clus can be reduced to very little, namely the poetics of Macabru]: Di Girolamo, ‘Trobar clus e trobar leu’, p. 23. 20 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 193. 21 Coassin, p. 42. 22 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 190.

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painstaking craft of his poetry and the intensity of his desire.23 Two famous passages illustrate this nexus particularly well. In canso II, Arnaut states: ‘obri e lim / mos de valor / ab art d’Amor’ (lines 12–14) [I work and file words of great value with the artistry of love]-words that, as Barolini puts it, ‘proleptically combine the “fabbro” metaphor of Purgatorio XXVI with [Dante’s] credo of Purgatorio XXIV’.24 Similarly, in canso XVI, he proclaims: ‘fas, que Amors m’o comanda, / breu chanzo de raiso lonia / cui gen m’aduz de las ars de sa scola’ [I shall make, since Love commands me, a song that’s brief, but long in theme, for nobly he has trained me in the arts of his school] (XVI, 3–5). Once more closely foreshadowing Dante’s celebrated self-definition in Purgatorio XXIV, Arnaut here describes how he heeds only the teachings of Love’s school. He claims that his poetry is not the product of literary convention, but of desire, and its singular aesthetic character is presented as suggestive of its inspired conception, its grounding in a unique subjectivity. Similarly, Paterson notes that, despite his vida’s assertion that Arnaut ‘amparet ben letras’, Arnaut in fact ‘minimizes his display of learning’.25 In canso IV, he downplays his knowledge of rhetoric (‘Ben conosc ses art d’escriure / que es plan o que es comba’ [I truly know, without the art of rhetoric, what is flat and what is curved: 41–2]), because to root his craft in ‘art d’escriure’ (which tellingly stands in opposition to the ‘art d’Amor’ cited above) would be to distance it from its ideal amatory source and to follow dictates extraneous to the self. To define Arnaut’s stylistic ethos in terms of a category such as trobar clus, then, immediately distracts us from what is distinctive about his poetics.26 Arnaut is anxious to tell us that he does not belong to any poetic ‘scola’, and roots his poetic identity in this claim. His unusual style is not at odds with, but rather is indissociable from, the love he describes.27 There is, in other words, much more at stake in Arnaut’s 23

See Toja, Canzoni, p. 74; Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 189. Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 113. See also Rea, ‘Guinizzelli Praised and Explained ’, p. 6. Elsewhere Rea links the passage to Cavalcanti’s insistence on love as the sole master of his poetic song: see R. Rea, Stilnovismo cavalcantiano e tradizione cortese (Roma: Bagatto, 2007), pp. 32–5. 25 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 190. 26 While he never used the term, Arnaut has also often been associated with the term trobar ric: a ‘style’ associated with elaborate and complex rhymes and metrics. Once again, however, it would seem reductive and misleading to reduce his style to an established formula. 27 As Barolini writes, ‘Stylistic considerations are indeed an integral part of Arnaut’s fascination, but precisely because he goes further than any previous troubadour in fusing formal values with his deepest identity, deriving style from an internalized erotic mysticism that is uniquely his’: Dante’s Poets, pp. 112–13. Similar points are made by several troubadour scholars. Paterson states that ‘the feelings [Arnaut] has in love and the feelings 24

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stylistic approach than a conventional form of obscurity or hermeticism— something not lost on Dante. In order to construct a clearer picture of Dante’s Arnaut, then, we must look beyond the critical commonplace of the troubadour’s association with the trobar clus, and consider him in less prescribed terms. In order to gain a clearer insight into his poetics, let us first turn to Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, which cites four poems by the troubadour that must assume a particular significance.28 Book II of the De vulgari is a vernacular ars poetica, in which Dante offers examples of ‘illustrious’ poetry by Italian, Occitan, and Old French writers. Of these, none is cited more times than Arnaut. The first of the treatise’s four citations of the troubadour comes early in Book II. Dante argues that human beings, who possess a tripartite soul, follow a ‘triplex iter’ [threefold path] (II, ii, 6) that is reflected in three subjects (arms, love, and rectitude), worthy of treatment in the illustrious vernacular. Each of these three subjects has a supreme exponent among the troubadours: Bertran de Born on warfare, Arnaut on love, and Giraut on rectitude. Among Italian poets, Dante identifies no superlative martial poet, but deems Cino da Pistoia and ‘his friend’ (a very thinly veiled reference to Dante himself) to have composed illustrious poetry on love and rectitude respectively (II, ii, 7–9). The mantle granted to Arnaut not only represents a significant accolade, but also complicates the notion that his importance he has for artistic perfection are inseparable’ (Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 189). While classifying Arnaut as a ‘hermetic’ poet, Del Monte writes that ‘l’ermetismo è in Arnaut una conseguenza della singolarità del suo stile, filiazione del suo individualissimo sentire e del modo in cui egli spera di poterlo trasmettere; e perciò non è imposto, ma spontaneo’ [hermeticism in Arnaut is a consequence of the singularity of his style, a product of his highly individual sensibility and the way he hopes to transmit it. Thus, it is not articifical, but spontaneous]: A. Del Monte, Studi sulla poesia ermetica medievale (Naples: Giannini, 1953), p. 89. While Sarah Kay states that ‘We can take expressions of artistic sensibility [in Arnaut’s poetry] as a metaphor, or a figurative expression, of amorous sensibility’ (‘Rhetoric’, p. 122). 28 My analysis in this section is concerned less with the technical properties of Arnaut’s poems (explored in depth by his several editors) than the relationship between the poet’s formal innovation and his standing in both the De vulgari and the Commedia as a quintessential love poet. There are two reasons why I restrict my analysis of Arnaut’s poetry to these four poems alone: first, because they are poems that Dante evidently admired, and upon which his esteem for Arnaut is at least partly founded; second, because there is no conclusive evidence as to where or when Dante encountered the work of the troubadours. While Arnaut was well represented in Italian chansonniers, it is possible he knew—or at least engaged closely with—little more than the four poems cited in the De vulgari (although, as we shall see, his comments in the treatise imply a rather broader acquaintance). It is easy to make reckless philological assumptions regarding Dante’s access to medieval texts, as discussed by Barański: see Z. G. Barański, ‘L’iter ideologico di Dante’, in Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intelletuale di Dante Alighieri (Naples: Liguori, 2000), pp. 9–39 (esp. pp. 9–11). On the difficulty of defining Dante’s precise acquaintance with the troubadours more broadly, see Beltrami, pp. 39–46.

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can be restricted to technical concerns,29 as Dante immediately establishes an important connection between Arnaut and this particular poetic magnalium. Like Petrarch some decades later, Dante evidently identifies Arnaut not merely as a master of form, but also as a ‘gran maestro d’amor’. Arnaut’s ‘L’aur’amara’ is cited as the pinnacle of his amatory production. Its opening stanza exhibits some of its key traits: L’aur’amara fa·ls broils brancuz clausir que·l dos’espeis’a foils, e·ls les becs dels aucels ramens te balbs e muz, pars e no-pars; per qu’eu m’esfors de far e dir placers a manz per lei qui m’a virat bas d’aut, don tem morir si l’afanz no m’adoma. (IX, 1–17) [The bitter breeze / Makes the leafy copses / Whiten / That the soft one thickens with leaves, / And the happy / Beaks / Of birds on branches / It holds stammering and mute, / Both paired and unpaired. / And so I strive / To do and say / Pleasant things / To many, because of her / Who has turned me from high to low, / So that I fear to die / If she doesn’t heal my torments.]

Given that Dante describes ‘L’aur’amara’ as a superlative treatment of the theme of ‘amoris accensio’, it may seem surprising that the sort of love it describes appears, at first glance, scarcely original, closely informed by the thematic topoi of the Occitan tradition. Its six main stanzas all describe the lover’s despair and his resolve to go on loving his lady. There is no obvious ideological innovation, no attempt to introduce a spiritually viable form of love or to reconcile carnal and spiritual desire, as some scholars have identified in Arnaut’s sestina, nor the intense sexual tenor that critics sometimes associate with the poet. Only a vague hope of physical 29 This is also the view of Toja: ‘A noi sembra interpretazione ristretta e unilaterale quella che vuole ridurre il giudizio critico dantesco su Arnaut, anche nel De vulgari eloquentia, a un puro apprezzamento tecnico formalistico’ [To us it seems a limited and one-sided perspective to reduce Dante’s critical appraisal of Arnaut, even in the De vulgari eloquentia, to a purely technical and formal appreciation] (Canzoni, p. 92).

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consummation lies at the end of the lover’s desire,30 while the lady herself is deeply abstract, embodying only canonical qualities of beauty (‘Douza car’a / toz aibs volguz’ [sweet face, with all the qualities: 69–70]) and courtly virtue (‘de Prez capdoils’ [the epitome of worth: line 55]). For a troubadour noted for his daring, the poem at first appears, on a thematic level, surprisingly platitudinous. What proves innovative, however, is not the type of love Arnaut describes, but the way in which this love is reinvigorated and individualized by the poem’s original and vibrant manner of expression. This is among the most formally and structurally complex of Arnaut’s lyrics. It has the longest stanzas (seventeen lines) of any of his cansos, an unusual mix of line-lengths (ranging from one syllable to six), and a remarkable number of different rhymes (ten in each stanza).31 Many of these rhymes are of the unusual and difficult sort (caras rimas) conventionally associated with moralizing poetry. The seasonal opening and subject matter are conventional enough: the transient winter landscape contrasts with the constancy of the lover’s desire, and, while he fears his love may lead him to death, he refuses to abandon it.32 The poem’s execution, however, allows it to transcend the commonplace. Lines 1–4 contrast the biting wind of winter with the sweet breeze of spring: while the former strips the branches bare, the latter invests them with lush foliage. This simple opposition is rendered with impressive economy. The alliteration of line two (‘broils brancuz’) conveys frosty chattering, and is set in relief by the assonance of longer [a] sounds in line one. By contrast, the vocalic sounds and sibilance of line four (‘que·l dos’espeis’a foils’) evoke the leafy fecundity of the distant spring.33 30 At the close of stanza three, Arnaut describes how only a kiss from his lady could cure his malaise (lines 49–51), while in stanza four the same hope of a kiss is all that keeps him alive (lines 62–5). 31 Toja notes the extraordinary number of different rhymes which appear across Arnaut’s corpus, identifying around one hundred in only eighteen canzoni: see Canzoni, pp. 41–4. 32 These are all troubadour topoi. See L. Paterson, ‘Fin’amor and the development of the courtly canso’, in Gaunt and Kay, eds, The Troubadours: An Introduction, pp. 28–46 (p. 33). 33 Perugi (pp. 91–7) argues that the sterile forest of ‘L’aur’amara’ is of considerable importance to Dante in the Commedia. He notes Dante’s use of ‘l’aura nera’ [the black air] (Inf. V, 51), ‘l’aura morta’ [the dead air] (Purg. I, 17), ‘l’aere amaro e scozzo’ [the foul, bitter air] (Purg. XVI, 13), and ‘l’aura etterna facevan tremare’ [the air forever trembling] (Inf. IV, 27), and argues that in the Commedia ‘L’aur’amara’ becomes a kind of lodestone (p. 93). In each case, he claims that the imagery of Arnaut’s bitter wind (and, by extension, sterile woodland) refers to ‘infernale malinconia’ [infernal melancholy] (p. 94), and is thus linked to the ‘selva oscura’ [dark wood] in which the pilgrim’s journey begins. This is opposed to the ‘aura dolce’ [sweet air] (Purg. XXVIII, 7) we find in the ‘divina foresta spessa e viva’ [thick and verdant sacred forest] (Purg. XXVIII, 2) of the Earthly Parardise (compare Arnaut’s ‘dos’espeis’a foils’). Perugi thus argues that the

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Immediately apparent is Arnaut’s sophisticated phonic instinct, particularly when describing nature. This can also be seen in the celebrated opening of the canso ‘En breu brisara·l temps braus’: En breu brisara·l temps braus e·l bis’e·l brüeils e·l brancs qui s’entreseigno trestutz de sobre claus rams de fueilla. (XI, 1–4) [In brief will break forth the blizzardish time and the breeze bluster on the branches, which now show themselves over boughs devoid of any leaf.]

The alliteration here is even more intense than in ‘L’aur’amara’.34 Again, Arnaut uses the image of bare branches, whose knotted form is evoked through the verses’ dense consonantal cluster, to evoke the raw solitude of the winter scene. The antitheses of these lines, in fact, seem to anticipate Dante’s description of the knotted wood of the suicides in the Inferno: Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco; non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ’nvolti; non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco. (Inf. XIII, 4–6) [No green leaves, but those of dusky hue; not a straight branch, but knotted and contorted; no fruit of any kind, but poisonous thorns.]

We begin to see how Arnaut’s unusual use of ‘difficult’ language is far from gratuitous. In the case of ‘L’aur’amara’, the unusually harsh sounds play a key role in evoking the forbidding landscape. The poem’s language and form also reflect the lover’s anxiety. As Paterson notes, the concision of the opening lines, the abundance of assonance and alliteration, and the number of words expressing constriction (‘balps e mutz’, for instance) create a sense of ‘extreme compactness’ that reflects the lover’s burdened introspection.35 This sense of constriction is further evoked by the tight web of sounds and echoes produced by the dense and intricate rhyme scheme. The stanza’s innovation is not restricted to its use of language and rhyme. The following six lines describe the woodland’s forlorn birds, whose beaks are reduced to stammering and silence by the bitter air. I see this as the most important image of the poem, and a highly instructive one in terms of understanding Arnaut’s poetics. This is because figures of Arnaut’s winter wood and its spring counterpoint serve as models for the two woods between which the pilgrim travels. 34 Toja (Canzoni p. 49) notes that alliteration of this intensity, seen fairly frequently in Arnaut’s work, is very seldom seen elsewhere in the troubadour corpus. 35 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 203.

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it serves not only as part of a topical winter scene, but also acts as a selfreflexive meditation on the poet’s use of language. Like the branches they rest upon, the birds’ song is at the mercy of the seasonal winds. Their beaks, joyous in spring, are now rendered stuttering and tacit (‘balbs e muz’) by the cold. This image of the stammering, solitary bird corresponds to the poet-lover, himself afflicted by the bitter wind of erotic torment. He, too, endures solitude, and his own song becomes ‘balbs’: it is, in fact, described in stanza four as his ‘quecs precs’ [‘stuttering prayers’] (56–7). Like the bare branches, Arnaut’s verse has been stripped of its smooth foliage and is now coarse and angular; like the lonesome birds of the woodland, he awaits the vernal wind so that his song may be revivified. Arnaut thus describes how the style of his poetry reflects his experience of love. In radically reappraising poetic form, Arnaut seeks to weld it to individual sensibility. The fact that the birds here (and, by extension, the poet) are ‘ramens’ (wild and branch-dwelling, rather than nest-raised) also points to the strong sense of individual selfhood that defines this unusual lyric. Lines 11–17 are of less interest than the rich opening. The lover continues to serve others out of love for his lady, even though she has led him to despair and may yet lead him to death. This is a standard courtly paradox: the lover is tortured by his unfulfilled yearning, yet he desires nothing but to love devoutly. It assumes greater life, however, through its implicit association with the landscape described earlier. Love, like the cold wind and warm breeze of the opening lines, can engender death or life. The poem, describing the ‘aur’amara’, relates the pain of unrequited desire. The poet-lover waits for the wind to change, for his desire to be somehow fulfilled. This would lead not only to erotic fulfilment, but would lead his stuttering ‘beak’ to joyful song, as style and sententia move in harmony. Stanza five of ‘L’aur’amara’ describes the lover’s devotion to his lady: Douz car’a toz aibs volguz, sovir m’er per vos mainz orgoilz car es decs de toz mos desens don ai manz bruz pars e gabars: de vos no·m torz ni·m fai partir

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avers, c’anc non amei re tant a menz d’ufaut, anz vos desir plus que Deu sil de Doma. (IX, 69–85) [Pretty face / With every desired quality, / For you / I’ll have to suffer many affronts; / For you’re / The limit / To all my follies, / From which I have many bad / Partners / And scoffings. /Wealth doesn’t wrench me away / Or make me part / From you, / For I never loved anything / So much with so little vanity; / Indeed, I desire you / More than the men of Domme God.]

The first ten lines describe how Arnaut’s love leads others to scorn him, while the following seven describe the unyielding commitment with which he continues to love. While expressions of devotion and desire are, of course, widespread in troubadour poetry, the fervour described here has an intensity that renders it ‘more than a commonplace’.36 Indeed, the stanza ends with the striking claim that Arnaut loves his lady even more ardently than the devoted citizens of Domme love God, establishing a bold analogy between the religious zeal of the most steadfast Christians and the poet-lover’s commitment to his lady. His love, writes Topsfield, consists of an ‘absolute submission to Amors as the primary source of personal happiness and poetic inspiration’,37 an erotic commitment of religious proportions. Two key characteristics of Arnaut’s love poetry have emerged in this first poem cited by Dante: his formal and linguistic prowess and the unique intensity of the erotic experience he describes. Crucially, these aspects are intimately connected. While the content of ‘L’aur’amara’ might at first be dismissed as conventional and its style as exhibitionistic, there is in fact an interplay between form and content that allows the poem to achieve a sophistication and idiosyncrasy beyond the formulism of Arnaut’s contemporaries.38 Thus, innovative techniques are not used for show, but very deliberately correspond to the poem’s thematic core. To reduce Arnaut to an indulgent master of hollow technique already seems simplistic, for what ‘L’aur’amara’ encapsulates is his endeavour to tally poetry, selfhood, and desire. He commits himself to his verse as he commits himself to his lady, and the meticulous construction of his poem evokes not only his fractured state of mind, but also the unique

36

37 Topsfield, p. 198. Topsfield, p. 198. As Edo puts it, Arnaut ‘no dijo nada nuevo pero todo lo dijo de un modo nuevo’ [said nothing new, but said everything in a new manner]: M. Edo, ‘Arnaut Daniel: El arte del “mejor fabbro” ’, Quimera, 134 (1994), 50–5. 38

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intensity of his love.39 ‘L’aur’amara’ does not seek to redeem or redefine love poetry, as does the Vita nova, but to revivify it, founding its poetics in a unique subjectivity.40 The De vulgari’s second reference to Arnaut (II, vi, 6), while more ‘technical’ than the first, refers to the troubadour’s overall command of form rather than a particular stylistic feature of his poetry. Having described less auspicious forms of syntax (II, vi, 4), Dante delineates the loftiest type of poetic construction. He first provides a Latin example of his own: ‘Eiecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totila secundus adivit’ [The greater part of your flowers, o Florence, having been snatched from your breast, the second Totila advanced in vain towards Trinacria]. This sentence, he says, rather imprecisely, is ‘wise and lofty’ (‘sapidus et venustus’), probably owing to its use of rhetoric (metaphor, apostrophe, alliteration, chiasmus), which is employed, without obscuring the phrase’s meaning. He then provides a list of ‘illustres cantiones’ [illustrious canzoni] that display a similar ‘gradus constructionis excellentissimus’ [excellent degree of contruction] (II, vi, 5). Third in this series, following poems by Giraut and Folco, is Arnaut’s canso ‘Sols soi che sai’ (XV). If ‘L’aur’amara’ displayed the rhetorical extravagance typically associated with Arnaut’s poetry, ‘Sols soi’ proves his corpus is no stylistic monolith. I cite the canso’s opening two stanzas: Sols soi qui sai lo sobrafan que·m sors al cor d’amor sofren per sobramar que mos volers es tan ferms e enters c’anc no s’esduis de seleis ni s’estors cui encobi al prim vezer-s’e pueis, c’ades ses lei dic a lei cointos moz pois can la vei no sai, tan l’ai, que dire. 39 Paterson writes that Arnaut ‘seeks the most concentrated effect of formal refinement and of the tight binding together of style and razo to produce a strong individual impression’: Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 202. Took states that Arnaut is ‘not hard for hard’s sake; on the contrary, the difficulty of form is almost invariably the difficulty of thought and feeling of a desperate and relentless state of mind’: J. F. Took, Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 66. 40 Picone sees this bond between Arnaut and his poetry as a vital aspect of Arnaut’s importance to Dante, noting the association in the vida between Arnaut-poeta and Arnautlover: ‘La vida e il vers sono . . . perfettamente interscambiabili. . . . È da questa completa coincidenza . . . che si diparte il giudizio dantesco della assoluta perfezione (mancato solo della directio voluntatis) raggiunta da Arnaldo nel campo delle sperimentazioni poetiche’ [There is a perfect identification between the vida and the poetry. And it is this identification that inspires Dante’s view of Arnaut as having reached a level of perfection in the realm of poetic expression, lacking only a strong ethical component]: ‘La tradizione romanza’, p. 38.

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D’autras vezer soi secs e d’auzir sors qu’en sola lei veg e aug e esgar, e ges d’aizo no·il soi fals placenters que mais la vol no di la bocha·l cors: que eu no vau cap vaus ni plas ni pueis qu’en un sol cors trobas sis bops aips toz que en lei volc Deus triar e assire. (XV, 1–14) [I am the only one who know the overwoe that rises in the heart from love in suffering through overlove, for my will so firm and so entire that it never fled from her or turned aside, the one whom I desired at the first sight and after, for still, without her, I speak to her heated words; then when I see her, I don’t know—so much I have—what to say. / I am blind in seeing others, and deaf in hearing them, for in her alone do I see and hear and attend, and in no way in this am I a false flatterer to her, because my heart loves her more than my mouth can tell; for I don’t course so many fields, vales, plains, hills that in one body alone I could find as here all the fine qualities, for in her God wanted to select and establish them.]

This is certainly not the self-indulgent trobar clus that Dante scholars habitually associate with Arnaut. While the opening two lines, like those of ‘L’aur’amara’ and ‘En breu brisara·l temps braus’, are densely alliterative,41 the prevailing style is elegant and understated. As Peter Dronke writes, ‘the canzone of Arnaut’s that [Dante] commended most highly, as being “illustrious” in its construction . . . is the least showy one—it is remarkable neither for its metrical pattern nor for unusual language, but for a sense of lucid order and control, a form that grows effortlessly out of the harmony of thought and means of expression’.42 Stylistic indulgence would in fact contradict the notion of rhetorical prudence that Dante endorses in this chapter of his treatise. If the form and imagery of the opening stanza of ‘L’aur’amara’ conveyed fractured anguish, the tone here is one of sober introspection, closer to Petrarch’s more stately canzoni than to the fraught eroticism of Dante’s ‘rime petrose’. Again, the poem’s style can be seen to correspond to the sentiment it describes. Here, states Paterson, ‘the gravity and stateliness of style reflect the mood of solitude, suffering, and the single-minded pursuit of love’.43 The exordium, like that of ‘L’aur’amara’, is impressively concise. The opening ‘Sols soi’—‘only I’—immediately introduces us to the solitude that permeates this poem. It also reflects, once again, Arnaut’s endeavour to particularize the love lyric, as he immediately stresses the highly personal 41 The alliterative sibilance immediately evokes, according to Sarah Kay, ‘isolation, excess and suffering’: Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, p. 142. 42 P. Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, p. 125. 43 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 205.

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nature of the experience he relates. The suffix sobr- is employed twice in these lines: the neologism ‘Sobrafan’ [‘overwoe’], describing the extraordinary anguish that the lover experiences, is followed by ‘sobramar’ [‘overlove’], the excessive love at the root of his malaise. These terms reflect the exceptional depth of Arnaut’s experience, and also suggest that the innate particularity of Arnaut’s desire is irreducible to the universal system of language.44 The same paradox informs the poem as informed ‘L’aur’amara’: Arnaut recognizes that his pain is born out of his desire, but his will holds firm and is not averted from his beloved: ‘que mos volers es tan ferms e enters / c’anc no s’eduis de seleis ni s’estors’. Stanza two describes the lover as blind and deaf to other women. The anaphora of lines 11–14 (‘que . . . ’) lends gravity to the closing words of the stanza, as the itinerant lover recounts his futile search for another such as his lady, in whom God placed every virtue. Once more, he willingly embraces the solitude and suffering love brings, since his commitment to Amors outweighs his desire for any other sort of contentment. Donna Yowell describes this canso as dominated by the theme of Arnaut’s ‘intemperate love’:45 the ‘sobramar’ of line two. Stanzas five and six reflect upon this: Jois e solaz d’autra·m par fals e bors c’una de prez ab lei no·s pot egar que·l seus solas es dels autres sobrers: ai, si no l’ai, las, tan mal m’aqeumors! Pero l’afanz m’es deporz, ris e jueis que en pensan soi de lei les e gloz: ai Deus, si ja·n serei esteirs jausire! Anc mais, zo·us pliu, no·m plac tan treps ni borz ni res al cor tan de joi no·m poc dar com fes aquel don anc feinz lauseniers ne s’esbruit c’a mi, sol, ses tesors . . . dic trop? Eu no, sol lei no si’enueis: bella, per Deu, lo parlar e la voz voill perdr’enanz que eu diga que·us tire. (XV, 29–42) [Joy and comfort with another to me seem false and spurious, for one cannot be equal with her in value, since her company is superior to all the rest. Ah, if you don’t have her! Woe, how badly she’s taken hold of me! However, the grief to me is sport, laughter and joy, for in thinking I am greedy and gluttonous for her, 44 As Sarah Kay puts it, ‘the song, while it seeks to be a communication act to a live audience, remains solipsistic because language is inadequate to the expression of passion’: Subjectivity, p. 141. Shapiro suggests that Dante was indebted to Arnaut’s use of neologisms: ‘Arnaut at the Summit’, p. 75. 45 Yowell, p. 388.

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O God! If ever I could be an enjoyer of her elsewhere! / Never, I pledge you, did a dance or a joust please me, nor was a thing able to bring to my heart so much joy as that affair, about which a feigning hypocrite never blabbed, for to me alone it is a treasure! Do I say too much? No! If only it doesn’t annoy her! Beautiful, by God! my talking and my voice I want to lose before I say what may annoy you.]

These stanzas wrestle with the lover’s immoderate desire, and describe the struggle that takes place in his mind. The exclamation in line 32 describes the pain he will feel if he does not possess his lady. Yet, once more, while his love brings him suffering, it paradoxically becomes a source of almost masochistic pleasure: ‘afanz’ [suffering] is also ‘deporz, ris e jueis’ [sport, laughter, and joy]. Line 34 describes how the thought of his beloved makes the lover avid with desire, and is immediately followed by an invocation to God, pleading that he may one day be able to enjoy his lady in a more temperate manner. These closing lines of the stanza constitute an intense self-examination and acknowledge the conflict born out of the lover’s sobramar. This struggle continues in stanza six. In line 40, Arnaut curbs his words (‘dic trop?’), for fear that the terms of his veneration may become too extreme, but promptly resumes his discourse, which he vows to cease only if it offends his beloved. Again invoking God, he declares that he would rather lose word and voice than injure his lady. This momentary self-reproach points to a certain trepidation, a recognition that the boundaries of propriety are being tested, yet the lover’s resolve remains unbroken. As in ‘L’aur’amara’, then, Arnaut describes a desire of singular intensity, one that goes beyond lyric convention and is far from the ‘courtly’ mezura to which homogenizing readers of the troubadours tend to refer.46 The remaining two references to Arnaut in Dante’s treatise are of a different kind. While the first two passages suggested a broad sense of mastery—firstly of magnalium and secondly of constructio—the later two regard particular technical features of his verse, and show Dante’s undoubted admiration for Arnaut’s formal innovation. Only one of these references cites a particular canso. This comes in chapter XIII of Book II, when Dante gives Arnaut’s ‘Si·m fos Amors de joi donar tan larja’ (XVII) as an example of a stanza without internal rhymes:

46 While ‘Sols soi’ describes a unique sort of desire, other aspects of the poem remain formulaic. The lady is again a clichéd and abstract figure, and it is when Arnaut describes her that his poem lapses into the derivative. Lines 16–17 describe her virtues, which, as in the previous canso, are commonplace: ‘mesur’e sens e autres bos mesters, / beutat, joven, bos faiz e bels demorsi’ [‘Moderation and good sense and other good qualities: Beauty, youth, good deeds, and pleasant pastimes’].

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In principio igitur huius capituli quedam resecanda videntur. Unum est stantia sine rithimo, in qua nulla rithimorum habitudo actenditur: et huiusmodi stantiis usus est Arnaldus Danielis frequentissime, velut ibi: ‘Se·m fos Amor de ioi dona’ et nos dicimus ‘Al poco giorno’. (DVE II, xiii, 2) [It will, therefore, be useful to anticipate some elements of the discussion at the beginning of this chapter. One of these is the unrhymed stanza, in which no organization according to rhyme occurs; Arnaut Daniel used this kind of stanza very frequently, as in his ‘Se·m fos Amor de ioi dona’ and I also used it in ‘Al poco giorno’.]

Dante unusually cites Arnaut’s canso alone alongside his own ‘Al poco giorno’. He wishes to present the troubadour as a poet with whom he shares a particular kinship, with the terms used (‘frequentissime’) suggesting (though not confirming) a broad acquaintance with his work. ‘Si·m fos Amors’ is structurally very similar to ‘Sols soi’. As in the earlier canso, rhymes appear in the same position in each stanza, although while each stanza of ‘Sols sui’ contained seven decasyllables, the stanzas of ‘Si·m fos Amors’ contain eight. As in the previous poems, the canso describes the lover’s long wait for gratification. The prospect of fulfilment here, however, is more tangible: Si·m fos Amors de joi donar tan larja com eu lei d’aver fer cor e franc, ja per granjor no·m calgra far embarc que am tant aut qu’espes me puei’e·m plomba, mas can m’albir com es de pres al som mot me n’am mais car anc l’ausei voler, qu’era sai eu que mon cor e mossenz me faran far lor grat richa conquesta. Si eu·fas loing-esper no m’enbarja, qu’en tan ric luoc me soi mes e m’estanc don si bel diz me tenran de joi larc e·u segrai tan que em port a la tomba, que eu no soi sel que lais aur per plom, e pos en lei no taing com ren esmer tan li seari fers e obedienz tro de s’amor, si·s plaz, baisan me vesta. (XVII, 1–16) [If Love were to me as broad in granting joy as I to her in holding a fine, frank heart, never for the great good (to come) would it vex me to be indebted; for now I love so high the thought uplifts and plummets me; but when I think how she’s at the summit of value, I love myself even more, for I ever dared to want her; so that now I know that my heart and my feelings will let me make, with their pleasure, a wealthy conquest. / Even if I have a long wait, it doesn’t hamper me, for I stand firm and I’m put in such a rich place that, with her beautiful words, she’d keep me full of joy, and I’ll follow until someone may carry me to my tomb; for I’m not at

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all the kind who would abandon gold for lead, and since it’s not proper to improve a thing in her, I’ll remain toward her very refined and obedient. Until, if it please, with a kiss she invest me with her love.]

Once more, the poem begins emphasizing the lover’s staunch commitment to Amors in a bravura opening. While there is no sign of the dense alliteration we saw earlier, Arnaut begins this canso with an ornate conditional clause describing the unreciprocated fidelity of his ‘fer cor e franc’ to Amors. Some defining thematic features from ‘L’aur’amara’ and ‘Sols soi’ remain. Arnaut once again describes his ‘ferm voler’ (line 44) and his lady’s peerless, if abstract, qualities (‘en lei reigna prez e sabers e senz / e tuit bon aip’ [in her reign worth, knowledge, wisdom, and all the good qualities: lines 30–2]). The two lines that conclude the stanza, however, represent a watershed: the deictic ‘era sai’ [now I know] suggests that a certain progression has occurred, and the future tense of ‘faran’ [will let me] in line 8 implies that the ‘richa conquesta’ [wealthy conquest] he has long sought may soon be realized. That the lover now describes his amorous pursuit as a ‘conquest’ is symptomatic of a different attitude, and the focus here is less on the lover’s solitude than on the tangible possibility of consummation. While in the previous poems—even when the lover expressed a degree of hope—the prevalent tone was one of resignation, he appears here less passive and more forthright. Stanza two resumes the topos of the constancy of Arnaut’s desire. Despite the torment of his ‘loing esper’ [long wait], Arnaut will not turn to another, since to do so would be to exchange gold for lead: ‘aur per plom’.47 Yet while in ‘L’aur’amara’ the possibility of conjugation was fixed in a remote future (‘tem morir / si l’afanz no m’adoma’ [So that I fear to die if she doesn’t heal my torments: IX, 16–17]), it is now presented as more probable: ‘tro de s’amor, si·s plaz, baisan me vesta’ [Until, if it pleases, with a kiss she invest me with her love] (16). We also see an unusual aggression enter his verse. In stanza five he addresses the ‘Fals lausengiers’ who mock his travails.48 While in the fifth stanza of ‘L’aur’amara’ the lover’s response to others’ scorn was a disconsolate disregard, he now confronts his antagonists with vitriol: Fals lausengiers, fuocs la langa vos arja e que pergas los oilz omne de cranc, que per vos son estrait caval e marc: Amor toles c’a pauc del tot non tomba! 47

canso.

Paterson (‘Fin’amor’, pp. 38–43) explores the use of monetary metaphors in this

48 Sarah Kay defines the lausengier as ‘the anti-subject’ of the troubadour canso and the ‘negative image of the lover-poet-singer’ (Subjectivity, p. 144).

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[False flatterers, may fire burn out your tongues, and may you lose both your eyes through canker, because through you are lost to us horses and marks; you snatch away love, that almost wholly tumbles! May God confound you—and may you not know how—since you create for lovers wicked talk and vile fame. Ill-starred is he who maintains you unenlightened ones, for the more he harangues you, the worse you become!]

Just as the lover’s solemn yearning has been replaced by a candid anticipation, so his stoicism in the face of the lausengiers has turned into a caustic scorn. He hopes that his enemies’ acid tongues be burned and that their prying eyes be destroyed by disease; he laments the demise of courtly society, caused by the very same enemies of Amors, which means that the gifts of horses and coins (‘caval e marc’) once given to troubadours have become a thing of the past; he asks that God do justice to his enemies, who are led into ignorance by the influence of a malign star (‘mal-astres’). Important here, and perhaps influential upon Dante, is the unusual physicality and corporeality of Arnaut’s language, a ‘concretezza’ that replaces courtly abstraction. The De vulgari’s remaining reference to Arnaut comes as Dante speaks of the division of the stanza into two ‘melodic’ parts. He notes that certain stanzas are written ‘sub una oda continua usque ad ultimum’ [in an ordered progression from beginning to end], without repetition or diesis. He continues: et huiusmodi stantia usus est fere in omnibus cantionibus suis Arnaldus Danielis, et nos eum secuti sumus cum diximus ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra’. (DVE II, x, 2) [stanzas of this kind were used by Arnaut Daniel in nearly all his canzoni, and I followed him when I wrote ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra’.]

While fleeting, this passage is again suggestive of Dante’s attitude towards the troubadour. His reference to ‘omnibus cantionibus’ once more suggests an extensive reading of Arnaut’s work, especially since his claim regarding Arnaut’s use of indivisible stanzas is a valid one.49 But this instance is particularly striking due to its unusual avowal of imitation (‘nos eum secuti sumus’), which grants Arnaut a standing of even greater importance and confirms his role as a model for Dante’s ‘rime petrose’. 49

See Toja, Canzoni, pp. 67–8.

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It is evident that Dante’s ‘Al poco giorno’ ‘followed’ Arnaut’s ‘Lo ferm voler’ (XVIII) in its use of the sestina form. And so, although it is not named in Dante’s treatise, it is important to consider Arnaut’s own, original sestina. While the meaning of the three lyrics discussed hitherto has been explicit, dominated by the same core themes, that of ‘Lo ferm voler’ is more contentious. Indeed, it is the only poem in Arnaut’s corpus whose meaning has proved genuinely difficulty to ascertain, and that commentators consistently classify as a trobar clus composition. Its structure, whereby the same six rhyme-words are repeated, albeit in a different order, in each stanza, is seen by critics as a means of evoking the lover’s erotic fixation and psychological paralysis. While a sense of obsession in ‘Lo ferm voler’ is unmistakable, however, the ultimate end of the lover’s desire has proved difficult to define. Readings range from those offered by Paterson and Yowell, who argue that the poem intimates the possibility of a spiritually viable human love,50 to those by Jernigan and Wilhelm, who, on the contrary, suggest that the entire poem is rooted in innuendo, double entendre, and carnal desire.51 I cite this complex poem in its entirety: Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra no·m pot ges bets escoisendre ni ongla de lausengier que pert per mal dir s’arma e no l’aus batre ab ram ni ab verja: 5 sivals a frau, lai on non airai oncle, jaucirai joi en vergeir o dinz chambra. Can mi sove de la chambra on al meu dan sai que neüz non entra, c’am si son tuit plus que fraire ni oncle, 10 non ai membre no·m fremisca, neis l’ongla, plus que o fai l’enfas denan denan la verja, tal paor ai iu sia trop d’es’arma. Del cors li fos, no de l’arma, e consentis m’a selat dinz sa chambra! 15 Que plus mi nafra·l cor que colps de verja car es seus sers lai on il es non intra. Tostemps serai a si com charz e ongla e no crerai chastic d’amic ni d’oncle.

50

See Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, pp. 193–201; Yowell, p. 386. See C. Jernigan, ‘The Song of Nail and Uncle: Arnaut Daniel’s Sestina “Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra” ’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1994), 127–51; Wilhelm, ‘Closed Troubadours’, p. 588. 51

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption Anc la seror de mon oncle non amei plus ni tan, per aquest’arma, qu’etan vezis com es lo deis de l’ongla, si·l plagues, volgra esser de sa chambra: de mi pot far l’amors qu’inz el cor m’intra meilz son vol que hom forz de frevol verja. 25 Pos flori la seche verja ni de n’Adam foro nebot e oncle, tan fin’Amors com sela qu’el cor m’intra cuiat fos en cors? ne nez en arma: on que iu stei, fors en pla o dinz chambra, 30 mos cors de lei no·s part tan com te l’ongla: c’aissi s’empren e s’enongla mos corts en lei com l’êcors, en la verja, qu’il m’es de Joi tors e palais a chambra e am la mais no fas cosi ni oncle, 35 qu’en Paradis n’aura doble joi m’arma si neüs om per ben amar lai entra. Arnauz tramet son chantar d’ongl’e d’oncle a grat de si qui de sa verja l’arma son desirar, cui prez en chambra intra.52 20

It is well known that the sestina’s six rhyme-words (‘intra’, ‘ongla’, ‘arma’, ‘verja’, ‘oncle’, and ‘chambra’) reflect the poet-lover’s ‘idee ossessive’ 52 ‘(Stanza one:) The firm will that enters into my heart / With no beak or nail can ever be torn away from me / By a false flatterer who, through evil talk, loses his soul. / And since I don’t dare to bat them with branch or rod, / At least on the sly, where I won’t have any uncle, / I’ll enjoy my joy in an orchard or in a chamber. (Stanza two:) Whenever I remember the chamber / Where, to my damage, I know that no man enters — / Instead everyone’s more (severe) to me than a brother or an uncle — / I don’t have a member that doesn’t tremble, nor a nail, / just like a child standing before the rod; / Such fear I have that it (she) may be too much for my soul. (Stanza three:) If only I were hers with body — not with soul — / So she’d consent to hiding me inside her chamber! / For it strikes my heart more than a blow from a rod, / That this serf of hers, where she is, doesn’t enter. / I’ll always be close to her, like her flesh and her nails, / And I won’t heed the reproach of a friend or an uncle. (Stanza four:) I never loved the sister of my uncle / More or as much — upon this soul of mine! — / For as close as stands the finger to its nail / (If it pleased her), I would like to be to her chamber. / The love that enters my heart can make me do / Its will sooner than can a tough man with a frail rod. (Stanza five:) Since the Dry Rod flourished / And from the Lord Adam issued nephews and uncles, / Such a fine love like that which enters my heart / I don’t think ever existed in a body or even a soul. / Wherever she may be — outside in the square or in her chamber — / My body doesn’t leave her as far as extends a nail. (Stanza six:) And so my body’s attached to hers / And clings with its nails like the bark upon a branch, / For to me she’s a tower of joy, a palace, a chamber, / And I don’t love as much any brother, parent, or uncle; / For in Paradise my soul will have double joy / If ever any man, through loving well, enters there. (Congedo:) Arnaut sends his song of the Uncle-Nail / For the pleasure of her who arms him with her rod, / His Desired One, whose value enters into the chamber.’

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[obsessive ideas].53 Immediately, however, one notes that Arnaut’s rhymewords are not abstract or pertaining to a conventional lyric register but, in the case of ‘ongla’ and ‘oncle’, strikingly concrete. While the six words at first appear miscellaneous, there emerges a sense of conflict between intimacy and intrusion that permeates the sestina. Del Monte observes that while ‘intra’, ‘arma’, and ‘cambra’ ‘evocano una chiusa intimità . . . “ ongla” e “verga” suggeriscono una dolorosa realtà, come una cruda remora alla fantasia poetica; “oncle” dissolve il nodo sentimentale con un’intrusione prosaica’ [evoke an enclosed intimacy, ‘ongla’ and ‘verga’ suggest a painful reality, a crude impediment to the poetic fantasy: the prosaic intrusion of ‘oncle’ shatters the romantic idyll].54 This sense of conflict can be seen in the poem’s first stanza, which appears, on a thematic level, fairly commonplace. The constancy of the lover’s desire—a topos we have seen in each of Arnaut’s lyrics—is immediately evoked alongside other courtly tropes, such as the ‘lausengier’ and the ‘oncle’ (who act as obstacles to the lover), the elusive private space of the ‘cambra’, and the need for secrecy that prevents him from retaliating against his rivals in line 4. Arnaut’s language, however, shows considerable imagination, especially given the lexical constraints imposed by the poem’s form. For instance, Ryding shows that the rhyme-word ‘ongla’ in this first stanza refers not to the human fingernail, as it does in later stanzas, but—in conjunction with the ‘beak’ (‘bets’) earlier in line 2—to the talon of a bird of prey. Thus, these lines describe how the malicious ‘lausengier’ will not tear apart the lover’s ‘ferm voler’ by beak or by claw: that is, by slander or by libel.55 The very presence of ‘ongla’, as well the lover’s thwarted desire to beat the ‘lausengier’ ‘ab ram [o] ab verja’ [with a branch or a rod], again introduce a striking physicality. ‘Ongla’ is later used to express ‘the intensity of physical desire in images of pain and flesh’ (‘Tostemps serai a si com charz e ongla’ [line 17]).56 These examples again reflect Arnaut’s attempt to move the love lyric away from courtly abstraction towards language of greater realism and dynamism: a vital operation in its anticipation of Dante’s ‘petrose’. But ‘Lo ferm voler’ is of considerable interest on an ideological as well as a formal and linguistic level. While the opening stanzas describe a love whose erotic intent is manifest (‘Dol cors li fos, no de l’arma, / e consentis m’a selat dinz sa chambra!’ [If only I were hers with body—not with

53

54 Del Monte, p. 86. Del Monte, p. 86. See E. S. Ryding, ‘Arnaut Daniel’s “Lo ferm voler” ’, The Explicator, 48 (1990), no. 4, 236–7. 56 Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 196. 55

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soul—so she’d consent to hiding me inside her chamber!: 13–14]), the final two stanzas introduce religious imagery (‘Pos flori la secha verja / ni de n’Adam foro nebot e oncle’ [Since the Dry Rod flourished and from the Lord Adam issued nephews and uncles: 25–6]); the description of a love seemingly carnal and spiritual (‘tan fin’Amors com sela qu’el cor m’intra / cuiat fos en cors? ne nez en arma’ [such a fine love like that which enters my heart I don’t think ever existed in a body or even a soul: lines 27–8]); and, most interestingly, the tentative association of human love and salvation (‘qu’en Paradis n’aura doble joi m’arma / si neüs om per ben amar lai entra’ [for in Paradise my soul will have double joy, if ever any man, through loving well, enters there: lines 35–6]). This shift, from courtly eros to a love more complex and perhaps spiritual, has prompted much critical debate. Nicola Zingarelli in fact suggests that Arnaut’s sestina, far from describing erotic obsession, was a noble expression of spiritual love: a view corroborated by other scholars.57 Paterson argues that the poem gradually moves away from the physical fixation suggested in the opening stanzas to a purified fin’amor and eventually to spiritual love. She suggests that this progression is reflected in the changing sense of the sestina’s rhyme-words. For instance, ‘intra’ [enters] is initially linked to the lover’s desire to enter into the forbidden ‘cambra’ [chamber] (lines 7–8), but later refers to his entrance into Heaven (lines 35–6). ‘Cambra’ itself, meanwhile, develops from ‘the conventional setting for erotic love’ (lines 6–7) to ‘the Paradise found in physical and spiritual union’ (line 33).58 She argues that the sestina resolves the conflict suggested in lines 12–13, where the lover expresses his fear that a spiritual love (‘de l’arma’ [of the soul]) will displace the physical love (‘del cors’ [of the body]) that he craves. In the final stanza, she claims, this conflict between the spiritual and the physical is settled, since Arnaut vows to love his lady ‘on que iu stei, fors en pla o dinz chambra’ [Wherever she may be—outside in the square or in her chamber]: that is, on both a carnal (‘dinz chambra’) and a non-carnal (‘fors en pla’) level.59 Topsfield echoes this view, describing how the sestina ultimately achieves a ‘balance of sensual and spiritual desire’,60 while Yowell suggests that the idea that the lover might attain salvation through loving his lady well is ‘an original idea in the troubadour corpus and highly suggestive for Dante and his readers’.61 The spiritual dimension of the love described in ‘Lo ferm

57 58 59 60

See N. Zingarelli, Provenza e Italia (Florence: Bemporad, 1939), pp. 114–15. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 199. See Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, p. 196. 61 Topsfield, p. 215. Yowell, p. 386.

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voler’ has also been explored by Barbiellini Amidei, who links the figure of the ‘cambra’ in the sestina to the Song of Songs.62 Yet other critics have strongly rejected this ‘spiritual’ reading of Arnaut’s sestina. Charles Jernigan argues that all six of the poem’s rhyme-words have strong erotic connotations, and that the entire poem mocks ‘formulaic troubadour sentiments by grinding them against the most disconcerting sexual reality’.63 His reading, which emphasizes a series of double entendres in the poem, could help explain some of the poem’s more cumbersome moments. He argues, for instance, that the ostensibly clumsy reference to ‘la seror de mon oncle’ [the sister of my uncle] in line 19 is not simply a consequence of the sestina’s knotty form but an innuendo calling to question the lover’s own legitimacy.64 Read in such a key, the sestina is a comic, subversive operation, lampooning the supposed moral integrity of fin’amor and exposing its underlying carnal intent through bawdy humour. Bondanella states that ‘if the poet’s theme is the religion of love, it is a religion firmly based upon sexual passion’.65 Arnaut’s sestina thus poses serious difficulties on an interpretative level. Readings contradict each other to the extent that while Yowell argues that Arnaut is saved from perdition by Dante due to his attempt to redeem the courtly lyric,66 Jernigan argues that ‘it is . . . evident that a poet who 62 ‘ . . . il giro ossessivo del desiderio dell’amante attorno alla cambra della donna in cui consiste la sestina è forse anche una probabile ripresa della Cantico dei Cantici, in cui è presente ugualmente il luogo chiuso del desiderio in cui l’amante deve penetrare, per la donna è ugualmente usata la metafora della torre, e come nella sestina ritorna l’immagine dei fratelli della donna’ [the lover’s obssessive dance of desire around the chamber of the lady which we find in the sestina is arguably a reprisal of the Song of Songs, where we similarly find the forbidden space of desire which the lover seeks to penetrate. There too the metaphor of the tower is used for the lady, and as in the sestina we find the image of the brothers of the lady]: B. Barbiellini Amidei, ‘L’immagine del desiderio e la metafora feudale nella sestina di Arnaut Daniel’, Cultura Neolatina, 64 (2004), 443–73. 63 Jernigan, p. 149. ‘Cambra’, he argues, was associated with the womb and the vagina; ‘intra’ suggests sexual penetration; ‘verja’, ‘ongla’ (‘s’enongla’ again suggests penetration), and ‘arma’ (in the sense of ‘weapon’) all have phallic connotations; ‘oncle’ was used as a comic term to describe an illegitimate father (pp. 132–41). Jernigan also claims that cor (heart) and cors (body), which appear frequently in the poem, are used for wordplay: for instance, ‘Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra’ refers not only to the constant longing of the heart, but also the ‘firm’ desire of the body: the lover’s erection (p. 136). 64 Jernigan, p. 141. 65 Bondanella, p. 433. De Lollis states of Arnaut’s sestina that ‘il desiderio della carne femminile [è] nella sua bruta realtà per eccellenza antistilnovistica’ [the desire for the female flesh is, in its crude reality, consummately anti-stilnovist] (p. 10). 66 See Yowell, p. 385. I find this argument unconvincing, Primarily since residence in Purgatory is less a marker of virtue than of contrition (one need only think of Manfred’s ‘orribil . . . peccati’ [horrible sins: Purg. III, 121–3]). We should remember that a penitent Francesca da Rimini might have been found alongside Arnaut on this terrace: the troubadour’s presence there does not point to his transcendence of the moral difficulties of erotic poetry, as Yowell suggests, but his susceptibility to them.

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considered his paradise to be his lady’s sexual parts and purposefully confused his penis with his soul (in arma) would need the refining fire of purgatory before he could enter the real paradise of the spirit’.67 Unless Dante gives us a concrete reason to do so, attributing a poet’s location in Dante’s afterlife to a specific poem seems methodologically unsound. However, given the relatively homogenous ideology of the poems examined hitherto, it is important to consider Arnaut’s objective here, especially given Dante’s manifest engagement with the sestina. While there is no doubting the carnal desire that underlies the references to the lady’s ‘cambra’ in the opening stanzas, we cannot deny that this erotic dimension is complicated by the religious imagery and the notion of ‘ben amar’ in the final stanza. Do we ultimately find in the sestina an attempt to fuse the poles of erotic and spiritual desire, or is this merely a poem of bawdy irreverence? Rather than suggesting that the poem constitutes an attempt to transpose carnal into spiritual desire or to explode the moral pretensions of fin’amor, I would argue that it evokes, above all, a tension between ‘cors’ and ‘arma’, between the lover’s erotic and spiritual commitment, which the poem seeks—but fails—to defuse. If crude innuendo underlies the description of the lover’s entry into ‘Paradis’ (Jernigan contends that it is the paradise of the lady’s vagina), this is not because the literal sense of salvation is completely negated by the innuendo, but rather because the lover is torn: he cannot renounce the possibility of sexual gratification just as he cannot renounce that of salvation. In his own crucial words, he seeks ‘doble joi’ [double joy]. This key term should point us towards the dual (and not integrated) sense of yearning that the lover describes. To delimit the poem’s significance to one or the other, as critics have tended to do, thus seems to miss the point. However convenient, we should not reduce ‘Lo ferm voler’ to some sort of proto–Vita nova,68 nor into an orgy of innuendo that accounts for Arnaut’s presence among the lustful in the Purgatorio. Instead, Arnaut’s sestina remains locked in ambivalence: carnal love moves in the direction of spiritual love, but cannot absorb it, and the poem’s unseemly erotic language remains. The sestina is of interest as the 67 Jernigan, p. 151. Contini, too, believed that the sestina’s eroticism accounted for the troubadour’s residence on the cornice of the lustful: ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’, p. 57. He also suggests that Guinizzelli finds himself among the lustful due to the erotic nature of his sonnet ‘Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo’ (11). 68 Yowell states, for instance: ‘It is generally recognized that Guinizzelli, Arnaut’s fellow denizen on the seventh cornice, occupies this important spot because his lyric discloses substantive though embryonic prefigurations of Dante’s more fully developed stilnovist concept of love. Guinizzelli compares himself to Arnaut and we assume a common ground [which, for Yowell, is the spiritually viable love of “Lo ferm voler”] for the comparison’ (p. 391).

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moment where the erotic lover allows us an insight into his spiritual condition. He remains conscious of his Christian obligations, but unable to transcend his erotic passion. Certainly, ‘Lo ferm voler’ attempts a progression from carnal desire to a desire with a spiritual dimension, but it is a progression unfulfilled. Instead, the lover remains inexorably locked in the very circle of desire that the poem’s form attempts to convey. It is, above all, testimony to Arnaut’s profound and unshakeable commitment to and identification with eros. There is no doubting that Arnaut’s technical influence upon Dante was considerable. This, as we shall see, is reflected in Dante’s adoption of various formal features of Arnaut’s verse in the ‘rime petrose’ and the troubadour’s prominence in the increasingly technical chapters that conclude the unfinished De vulgari. The final poem to be cited in the treatise is Dante’s formidable ‘Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna’ [Love you see well that this lady]: a technical tour de force often seen as ‘an attempt to surpass the Provençal master’s skill in the sestina form’.69 Arnaut’s influence pushed Dante beyond the comfort zone of the ‘stilnovo’ towards a level of formal sophistication that he had not discovered elsewhere. Yet formal innovation alone is not what Dante admired in Arnaut, for it is the intimate relationship between Arnaut’s technique and the love he describes that constitutes the defining feature of his poetic identity. He rallies against the stylistic commonplaces of the medieval lyric, eschewing language that might dilute the veracity or individuality of his expression. The association of complexity with ‘contrivance’ or ‘indulgence’ in relation to Arnaut, which we find in much Dante scholarship, overlooks the way in which the troubadour accounts for that complexity. The mark of poetic ‘sincerity’ or ‘spontaneity’ for Arnaut is not verbal simplicity or limpidity, but a singular poetic language that tallies with the unique intensity of the desire he describes. 4.2 ‘NOS EUM SECUTI SUMUS’: DANTE’S KINSHIP WITH ARNAUT As the moment in Dante oeuvre where the influence of Arnaut’s ‘highly wrought and bizarre beauty’ is most apparent,70 a consideration of the ‘rime petrose’ must constitute a vital part of any discussion of the two poets. The four poems describe a dark, erotic passion for the distant, 69

Bondanella, p. 418. Foster-Boyde, II, 258. They claim that Dante’s acquaintance with Occitan poetry, having previously been filtered through Guittone and the Sicilians, is now first-hand. 70

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unheeding ‘stony lady’ and the prevalence of stony imagery in the poems and the lady’s menacing presence evoke the myths of Medusa (who, as shown by Freccero, is later described in Inferno IX with textual echoes of the ‘petrose’)71 and Pygmalion. Critical understanding of the sequence has shifted over recent decades, and Gianfranco Contini’s influential view, that the poems act only as a ‘workshop’ in which Dante trials his new poetics (their content a mere pretext) has been challenged.72 Heather Webb writes that they ‘stage the impossibility of divinely inspired poetry’: they describe, in other words, a ‘physiospiritual malfunction’ on the part of the lover-poet, and create a poetics corresponding to it.73 Despite the increased scholarly attention they have received, however, the ‘rime petrose’ remain an anomalous and elusive moment in Dante’s career. I do not aim, of course, to provide an exhaustive exposition of the ‘petrose’ here, but rather to reflect upon the role that Arnaut plays in their realization, and the extent to which the four poems—traditionally approached in a narrowly stylistic key—reflect the relationship between style and content, poetry and love, that I believe to be integral to the troubadour’s art. Arnaut’s influence upon the ‘rime petrose’ is irrefutable. As is made explicit in the De vulgari, Dante’s sestina ‘Al poco giorno’ follows the formal lead of Arnaut’s ‘Lo ferm voler’, while his ‘double’ sestina ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’ is widely seen as an attempt to surpass the troubadour on a formal level. Other key stylistic features of Arnaut’s poetry—his harsh language, concrete lexicon, difficult rhymes, intense solitude, and thematics of craftsmanship—also appear in Dante’s poetry for the first time. The striking change of style that we witness in the poems corresponds to a new materia, as Dante himself exclaims: ‘Così nel mio parlar voglio esser 71 See Freccero, ‘Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit’, in The Poetics of Conversion, pp. 119–35 (p. 129). 72 See Contini, Rime, p. 431. The most substantial scholarly contribution on the ‘petrose’ sequence is Durling and Martinez’s Time and the Crystal. The authors argue that the ‘petrose’ are to be understood in terms of neoplatonic cosmology, and that the poems ‘solve’ the problems which they present. Barolini, in her review of the volume, argues that ‘at times the authors’ enthusiasm for their argument verges on the tendentious, and results in overstatement’ (p. 104) and that ‘[they] risk banalizing the importance of the petrose: to claim that the lyrics are present in the Commedia’s every meteorological reference, in its every astronomical periphrasis, is ultimately to dilute their presence and to diminish their intertextual value’ (p. 105): T. Barolini, ‘Review of R. M. Durling and R. L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose’, Comparative Literature, 46 (1994), 104–6. Other important contributions on the ‘petrose’ include P. Allegretti, ‘Il maestro de “lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore” (Inf. I, 87), ovvero la matrice figurativa della sestina da Arnaut Daniel a Virgilio’, SD, 67 (2002), 11–55; C. Bologna, Il ritorno di Beatrice (Roma: Salerno, 1998); E. Fenzi, ‘Le rime per la donna Pietra’, in Miscellanea di studi danteschi (Genoa: Bozzi, 1966), pp. 229–309; H. Webb, ‘Dante’s Stone Cold Rhymes’, DS, 121 (2003), 149–68. 73 Webb, ‘Dante’s Stone Cold Rhymes’, pp. 150–1.

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aspro / com’è ne li atti questa bella petra’ [I want to be as harsh in my speech as this fair stone is in her behaviour] (46.1–2). The poet’s ‘parlar aspro’ and use of new poetic forms thus correspond to the harshness of his lady and his bitter erotic experience. Dante finds himself at the poetic antipode of the Vita nova’s ‘stilo della loda’ [praise style], as the ethereal setting of ‘Donne ch’avete’ and ‘Oltre la spera’ gives way to a forbidding landscape of immovable earthly matter. Indeed, by situating love in the realm of matter, Dante not only turns to Arnaut but returns to his former ideological adversary, Guido Cavalcanti. The canzone ‘Io son venuto al punto de la rota’, often seen as the first poem in the series, describes the change that has occurred and sets the scene for the sequence: Io son venuto al punto de la rota che l’orizzonte, quando il sol si corca, ci partonisce il geminato cielo, e la stella d’amor ci sta remota per lo raggio lucente che la ’nforca sì di traverso che le si fa velo; e quel pianeta che conforta il gelo si mostra tutto a noi per lo grand’arco nel qual ciascun di sette fa poca ombra: e però non disgombra un sol penser d’amore, ond’io son carco, la mente mia, ch’è più dura che petra in forte imagine di petra. (43.1–13) [I have come to that point on the wheel when the horizon, once the sun goes down, brings forth the twinned heaven for us; and the star of love is removed from us by the shining beam which so rides across it as to veil it away; and the planet that intensifies the cold stands fully revealed to us along the great arc in which each of the seven casts the shortest shadow. And yet my mind does not shake off a single one of the thoughts of love that burden me—my mind that is harder than stone in strongly retaining an image of stone.]

The shift is reflected most obviously in the change of season: it is not spring—the conventional season of love—but winter. Moreover, the most prominent ‘stella’ is no longer Venus, which is now veiled, but Saturn.74 74 The conventional dating of the ‘petrose’ sequence (1296) is based upon this astronomical reference. This is not universally accepted. Rossi, for instance, argues that they were written in 1304, believing that lines 7–8 of ‘Io son venuto’ refer not to Saturn, but the moon: see L. Rossi, ‘Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (CIII)’, Letture classensi, 24 (1995), 69–89. This argument is problematic, however, since, as Scott notes, ‘Così nel mio parlar’, if contemporaneous with the De vulgari eloquentia, would contradict the treatise in its use of words excluded from the noble style befitting the canzone form: see Scott,

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This has significant implications for the poet-lover, as the benign influence of ‘la stella d’amor’ is replaced by the melancholic and destructive eros of ‘quel pianeta che conforta il gelo’.75 This opening stanza describes the advent of winter in terms of astronomy, while the ensuing stanzas describe the seasonal change from the perspectives of other natural sciences: meteorology, zoology, botany, and geology. This alone represents a watershed in Dante’s poetry. Not only does he introduce an unprecedented erudition to his verse, but he relates his condition as lover through ‘things’ extraneous to the self for the first time.76 In the terms of Durling and Martinez’s study of the ‘petrose’, this is the advent of Dante’s Neoplatonic ‘microcosmic poetics’, which describe the parallels between the cosmos and the human body.77 ‘Io son venuto’ describes ‘a kind of conspiracy of the entire cosmos against [the lover]’,78 whose resolve contrasts with the solitude brought about by the changing of the seasons. Each stanza comprises an opposition between the hostility of nature and the lover’s devotion, pivoting upon the adversative ‘e’ of the tenth line. The climax of ‘Io son venuto’ comes in the violence of its fifth stanza: Versan le vene le fummifere acque per li vapor che la terra ha nel ventre, che d’abisso li tira suso in alto; onde cammino al bel giorno mi piacque che ora è fatto rivo, e sarà mentre che durerà del verno il gran assalto; la terra fa un suol che par di smalto, Understanding Dante, p. 77. A radical reassessment of the dating of several of the ‘rime’ has also been offered by Federico Ferrucci. Reinterpreting the astronomical reference in ‘Io son venuto’, which he too believes refers to the moon and not Saturn, he situates the ‘petrose’ (prefaced by the ‘pargoletta’ sequence) and the Convivio in the period immediately preceding the inception of the Commedia. This is based in part on the epistle to Moroello Malaspina, which speaks of Dante’s powerful love for a new woman, described in the ‘canzone montanina’, who for Ferrucci is none other than the ‘pargoletta’ and ‘donna pietra’. The figure in question, he argues, was a proud young aristocrat encountered during Dante’s sojourn with the Conti Guidi in 1307–1308. Ferrucci’s hypothesis is intriguing but complicated by the fact that, according to the literal sense of the Commedia, Dante’s straying from the true path took place in the years between Beatrice’s death and the year 1300. See F. Ferrucci, ‘ “Plenlunio sulla selva”: Il Convivio, le petrose, la Commedia,’ Dante Studies, 119 (2001), 67–102. 75 This sort of Cavalcantian astrological fatalism is, of course, rejected by Dante in the Commedia, notably in the pilgrim’s discussion with Marco Lombardo (see Purg. XVI, 65–105) and in the Heaven of Venus (see Par. VIII, 1–12). On the association of Saturn and Melancholy, see R. Klibanski, E. Panofski, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: T. Nelson, 1964); J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. by L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 76 See Foster-Boyde, II, 260. 77 For an introduction to this idea, see Durling-Martinez, pp. 3–4. 78 Durling-Martinez, p. 48.

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a l’acqua morta si converte in vetro per la freddura che di fuor la serra: e io de la mia guerra non son però tornato un passo a retro, né vo’ tornar; ché, se ’l martiro è dolce, la morte de’ passare ogni altro dolce. (43.53–65) [The springs spew forth fumy waters because the earth draws the gases that are in its bowels upwards from the abyss; so that a path that pleased me in fine weather is now a stream, and so will remain as long as winter’s great onslaught endures; the earth has formed a crust like rock and the dead waters turn into glass because of the cold that locks them in. And yet I have not withdrawn one step from the struggle, nor will I withdraw; for if suffering be sweet, death must be sweet above all things.]

Here we see a proliferation of words ‘either dissonant in sound or negative in meaning’ (‘ventre’, ‘abisso’, ‘assalto’, ‘smalto’, ‘vetro’, etc.).79 The alliteration of [v] sounds in the opening lines creates an atmosphere of stuttering discordance, a world away from the tonal fluidity of the ‘stilnovo’.80 The lover’s malaise is reflected not only in the stanza’s abrasive language but also in the association, once more, of lover and landscape, man and cosmos. Durling and Martinez note that underground vapours were linked in the Middle Ages to human orgasm,81 and the image of the earth spewing forth gases evokes the lover’s ‘destructive erotic fervour’.82 We must not overstate Arnaut’s influence upon this poem. The brooding eros that Dante describes is like nothing we find in the troubadour’s corpus, nor is the environment in which the canzone unfolds.83 ‘Io son venuto’ depicts the lover’s solitude against a backdrop whose scope strives to convey the entire spectrum of natural life, as Dante ‘explore[s] the relation of his bodily nature to the universe that impinges on it’.84 It has a totalizing objective that takes it beyond what we are accustomed to in the medieval lyric, and a breadth of erudition closer to Guinizzelli’s love poetry than to Arnaut’s. Nor do we witness any substantial formal correspondence between ‘Io son venuto’ and Arnaut’s poetry: while the rhyme-words that end each stanza and reflect the poet’s obsessions 79

Wilhelm, ‘Arnaut Daniel’s Legacy to Dante and to Pound’, p. 72. I do not accept Bondanella’s claim that Dante in the ‘petrose’ produces harsh effects ‘by the power of superbly chosen imagery alone’ (p. 429). In this instance—as in many others—his linguistic choices clearly attempt to convey meaning through harsh and abrasive sounds. 81 82 Durling-Martinez, p. 82. Webb, p. 155. 83 Both Bondanella (p. 419) and Webb note that while Arnaut at times focuses upon the possibility of consummation, the ‘petrose’ present a situation where ‘there is essentially no future’ (Webb, p. 158). 84 Durling-Martinez, p. 96. 80

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perhaps owe something to the use of rhyme-words in Arnaut’s sestina, the form used by Dante is otherwise that of a standard Italian canzone. Yet while Arnaut’s influence upon the poetics of ‘Io son venuto’ is one of several competing factors, it is unquestionably present. The relationship in Dante’s poem between winter and the lover’s indomitable resolve has often been compared to the opening of Arnaut’s ‘Quan chai la fuelha’ (III), which proclaims ‘Tot quant es gela / mas ieu non puesc frezir’ [Everywhere there is a freeze, but I can never grow cold] (lines 9–10): a phrase that neatly mirrors the sententia of Dante’s poem.85 Given that Dante himself never mentions ‘Quan chai la fuelha’, however, it seems strange that critics have not, to my knowledge, drawn comparisons between ‘Io son venuto’ and Arnaut’s ‘L’aur’amara’. In the opening stanza of that canso we saw the very same opposition between the sterility of winter and the lover’s abiding love for his lady. What is more, the structure of that opening stanza is, in fact, analogous to each stanza of ‘Io son venuto’, similarly divided between the descriptions of the hostile and barren landscape and the lover’s enduring desire. Dante’s description of tacit birds in stanza three (‘e li altri han posto a le lor voci triegue / per non sonarle infino al tempo verde, / se ciò non fosse per cagion di guai’ [and the rest have imposed a truce on their tongues, and will make no sound until the green season unless it be to lament: 43.30–2]) also recalls the opening of ‘L’aur’amara’ (‘e·ls les / becs / dels aucels ramens / te balbs e muz’ [And the happy beaks of birds on branches it holds stammering and mute: IX, 5–8]), along with the image of leafless branches in stanza four (‘ramo di foglia verde a noi s’asconde / se non se in lauro, in pino o in abete / o in alcun che sua verdura serba’ [branches green with leaf are taken from our sight, save in bay or pine or fir, or in other trees that retain their leaf: 43.43–5]). Both poets use this sterile landscape to draw a contrast between nature’s transience and the lover’s evergreen desire. Elsewhere, the fifth stanza of ‘Io son venuto’ is redolent of Arnaut in its use of alliteration and harsh and difficult rhymes. Throughout Dante’s canzone, language is largely concrete rather than abstract, introducing a physicality whose most obvious lyric precedent comes in Arnaut’s poetry.86 85 See Bondanella, p. 418; Contini, Rime, p. 432; Foster-Boyde, II, 259; Toja, Canzoni, p. 96, n. 1. 86 Foster and Boyde (II, 274) note the shift from abstract to concrete nouns which occurs from the Vita nova, in whose poetry 150 of the 229 nouns are abstract, to ‘Così nel mio parlar’, where the concrete outnumber the abstract by 48 to 29. Del Monte describes Arnaut’s ‘fantasia precipuamente visiva, tendente a rappresentare anche le reazioni sentimentali in modi realistici, corposi e sensuali’ [mostly visual imagination, tending to represent even emotional reactions in realistic, bodily, and sensual ways] (pp. 87–8). Di Girolamo, on the other hand, argues that the language of the poems shows ‘un’asprezza e . . . una

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It is in the next two ‘rime petrose’ that the formal influence of Arnaut comes to the fore. The first of these, ‘Al poco giorno’, is Dante’s sestina.87 Dante’s decision to adopt this form is not an arbitrary one; rather, he seeks a form that might help convey his own fraught solitude. He is ‘serrato intra piccioli colli’ (44.17), ensnared between ‘small hills’ (widely seen as referring to the donna’s breasts): an image that conveys the entrapment that eros has caused him. This calls to mind the image of the proximity of flesh and fingernail (‘Tostemps serai a si com charz e ongla’ [I’ll always be close to her, like her flesh to her nails]: XVII, 17) used to evoke the lover’s similarly paralyzed fixation in Arnaut’s sestina. In its evocation of obsession and psychological entrapment, the sestina is the ideal vehicle for conveying the sort of inexorable anguish that the ‘petrose’ describe. It is a form, furthermore, whose rigid structure seems to augur the petrification that love for the Medusa-like donna petrosa threatens to cause. Heather Webb tellingly contrasts the static circularity of the sestina with the Commedia’s ‘terza rima’. The latter is ‘a model of healthy circulation, infinitely open to gathering in new sounds and new material from outside itself ’;88 the sestina, by contrast, is a poetic form turned in upon itself, a means of conveying inertia and ‘physiospiritual’ paralysis. The idea of form corresponding to content receives its fullest expression in the unique ‘double’ sestina, ‘Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna’ [Love you see well that this lady] (45). This poem redoubles the poetic challenge presented by the Arnaldian sestina. Like ‘Al poco giorno’, it uses rhymewords to convey the lover’s obsessions, but these are now repeated even more intensely, in an intricate scheme within each stanza.89 Foster and Boyde claim that the poem is ‘entirely dominated by the craftsman’s delight in overcoming the difficulties presented by rhyme, here deliberately raised to a maximum’.90 Yet while Dante clearly sets himself a devilish poetic challenge, the poem’s significance goes beyond its technical complexity. Instead, Dante—like Arnaut—again endeavours to convey his psychological state through his use of poetic form. While in ‘Al poco giorno’ he did this by using the form that Arnaut had invented, in ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’ he creates his own, innovative model. Rather than viewing this merely as an attempt to outdo Arnaut’s sestina, ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’ is

violenza verbale sconosciuta al perigoriano’ [a harshness and verbal violence unknown to the poet from Périgord]: I trovatori (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), p. 174. 87 On possible allusions to Arnaut in Dante’s sestina, see Perugi, ‘Arnaut Daniel in Dante’, pp. 79–80. 88 Webb, p. 160. 89 For a succinct description of the poem’s structure, see Foster-Boyde, II, 269. 90 Foster-Boyde, II, 269.

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ultimately an attempt to do as the troubadour had done, creating a new expressive means (a ‘novità’, as the final stanza describes it) in order to articulate a singular psychological state. I cite the poem’s third stanza: Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo l’acqua diventa cristallina petra là sotto tramontana ov’è il gran freddo, e l’aere sempre in elemento freddo vi si converte, sì che l’acqua è donna in quella parte per cagion del freddo: così dinanzi dal sembiante freddo mi ghiaccia sopra il sangue d’ogne tempo e quel pensiero che m’accorcia il tempo mi si converte tutto in corpo freddo, che m’esce poi per mezzo della luce là ond’entrò la dispietata luce. (45, 25–36) [Lord, you know that through freezing cold the water becomes crystal stone, there in the north where the great cold is; and there the air is perpetually changing into the cold element, so that there water is lady, because of the cold; likewise, in the presence of that cold face my blood at all times freezes and that thought which shortens my time is all changed into a cold body, which then issues from me by way of the light through which the pitiless light entered.]

The use of rhyme words here, like in ‘Al poco giorno’, conveys constriction and obsession. This stanza, dominated by the rhyme-word ‘freddo’, describes the congealment and ‘crystallization’ of freezing water (‘l’acqua diventa cristallina petra’). It shows once more the intellectual sophistication and ‘microcosmic–macrocosmic parallelism’ that Dante introduced in ‘Io son venuto’,91 relating the coldness of the lady to the ‘algente freddo’ of the landscape. Furthermore, the depiction of this natural process, as noted by Durling and Martinez,92 seems intimately connected to Dante’s composition of his poem: just as the water hardens to become ice, the poem itself permanently takes its rigid, ‘crystalline’ form. As in the sestina, the poem’s form evokes the spectre of petrification that looms over the ‘petrose’. This sort of parallelism reflects the poem’s (and the entire series’) deeply Arnaldian concern with the ‘closeness of expression and inspiration’.93 In the congedo, Dante describes his poem taking its unique shape: 91

Durling-Martinez, p. 146. The poem, they say, ‘is fixed, rigid, and symmetrical, permanently shaped, the product of a temporal process of which it remains to some degree a map: it is a crystal’: Durling-Martinez, p. 147. 93 Bondanella, p. 425. 92

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Canzone io porto ne la mente donna tal che, con tutto ch’ella mi sia petra, mi dà baldanza, ond’ogni uom mi par freddo: sì ch’io ardisco a far per questo freddo la novità che per tua forma luce, che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo. (45.61–6) [Song, I bear in my mind a lady, such that, though she is a stone to me, she gives me such boldness that all men to me seem cold; so that I dare to create for this cold object the novelty that is alight through your form, a thing never conceived before at any time.]

Dante’s art seems to represent the only possible egress from his quandary. His poems attempt to soften and placate the stony lady: an endeavour that requires a ‘novità . . . / che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo’. The difficulty of the poem’s form reflects the difficulty of transcending his acute psychological impasse. The ‘double’ sestina is not an empty trial of strength, but a response to the state in which Dante finds himself: thus, it attempts the ‘catarsi estetica’ [aesthetic catharsis] that Del Monte identifies as the defining characteristic of Arnaut’s poetry.94 In addition, then, to Dante’s use of the sestina and his deployment of harsh language and difficult rhymes (particularly, as we shall see, in the remaining ‘rima petrosa’, ‘Così nel mio parlar’), Arnaut’s poetry seems to anticipate the operation of the ‘petrose’ in a more fundamental sense. In ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’, Dante—like Arnaut in ‘Lo ferm voler’ or ‘L’aur’amara’—seeks the fusion of form and content encapsulated by Arnaut’s poetry. At stake here is not a conventional espousal of a different register in line with a change of subject-matter, as we saw, for instance, in the canzone ‘Le dolci rime’, nor is it a difficulty that relates to the poet’s desire to seek an elite and discerning poetic audience. Rather, the correspondence of form, lexis, and content assumes an unprecedented importance, and this is why the ‘petrose’, and Arnaut, represent such fundamental steps in the journey to the extraordinary range of expression we find in the Commedia, where poetry must not differ from the fact (‘sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso’: Inf. XXXII, 12).95 94

Del Monte, p. 88. ‘Later poems certainly gain considerably in lexical and therefore expressive range from this experience, and the unorthodox approach to poetic diction that is evident here was obviously one of the most important prerequisites for the lexical richness of the Commedia’: Foster-Boyde, II, 275. The closing cantos of the Inferno, in particular, owe a great deal to the stylistic gains made in the ‘petrose’. In canto XXXII, Dante’s famous call for harsh rhymes (‘S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce / come si converebbe al tristo buco / sovra ’l qual pontan tutte le altre rocce . . .’ [If I had verses harsh enough and clucking, as would befit this dismal hole upon which all the other rocks weigh down . . . ]: Inf. XXXII, 1–3) 95

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If ‘Al poco giorno’ and ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’ showed Dante’s formal debt to Arnaut, the remaining poem in the ‘petrose’ sequence—‘Così nel mio parlar’ [I want to be as harsh in my speech]—reflects the troubadour’s lexical influence. While it takes the form of a standard canzone, its radical use of language marks perhaps the most striking moment of stylistic evolution anywhere in Dante’s Rime. Again, the innovation is not hollow or gratuitous, but rather, as the opening lines tell us, a reflection of the poem’s theme of thwarted erotic desire: Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro com’è ne li atti questa bella petra, la quale ognora impetra maggior durezza e più natura cruda, e veste sua persona d’un dïaspro tal, che per lui, o perch’ella s’arretra, non esce di faretra saetta che già mai la colga ignuda: ed ella ancide, e non val ch’om si chiuda né si dilunghi da’ colpi mortali, che, com’avesser ali, giungono altrui e spezzan ciascun’arme; sì ch’io non so da lei né posso atarme. (46.1–13) [I want to be as harsh in my speech as this fair stone is in her behaviour—she who at every moment acquires greater hardness and a crueler nature, and arms her body with jasper such that, because of it, or because she retreats, no arrow ever came from quiver that could catch her unprotected. But she is a killer, and it is no use putting on armour or fleeing from her deadly blows, which find their target as though they had wings and shatter one’s every weapon; so that I’ve neither the skill nor the strength to defend myself from her.]

The linguistic shift described in the opening two lines reflects the thematic change that has occurred in Dante’s love poetry. The passion described here is everything that the Vita nova aimed to prove that love was not: the deadly and irrational love of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna me prega’, against whose ‘colpi mortali’ resistance is futile. Not only is Dante’s love changed beyond recognition, but his lexis, too, has assumed a wholly new complexion: none of is followed by a description of the icy lake in the pit of Cocytus (Inf. XXXII, 22–4) whose glass-like rigidity is unmistakably redolent of the ‘petrose’. I consider the poetics of Cocytus, partly in relation to the ‘rime petrose’, in my forthcoming lectura of Inferno XXXII: see. T. Kay, ‘Inferno XXXII’, Lectura dantis andreapolitana: Inferno XXVIII– XXXIV, ed. by C. Rossignoli and R. Wilson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). On the ‘petrose’ and the language of the Commedia more broadly, see L. Blasucci, ‘L’esperienza delle petrose e il linguaggio della Divina Commedia’, Belfagor, 12 (1957), 403–31.

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the myriad of metaphors, harsh-sounding words, or concrete nouns in this poem would have found a place in Dante’s earlier verse. Like a narrowly formalist understanding of Arnaut, the traditional interpretation of the ‘petrose’ as a ‘workshop’ for Dante’s new style appears limited; rather, the importance of the sequence lies in Dante’s endeavour to break the shackles that compromised and diluted his expressive capacity and created a disjunction between poetry and love. They represent the moment in Dante’s lyrics where style and content are most deliberately and painstakingly matched, a project far more important and sophisticated than the more prescribed change of register according to subject matter seen in the canzoni discussed in the previous chapter. Arnaut’s influence upon this operation is considerable, and we should consider the troubadour—like the Dante of the ‘petrose’—not to be a purely ‘technical’ poet, but rather one who sought to reinvigorate lyric poetry so that it might somehow tally with the ardent and tumultuous desire he described. But what of the relationship between Arnaut and Guittone? I argued in Chapter 3 that the poetic motives underpinning Dante’s distaste for Guittone are essentially twofold: an objection to Guittone’s ideological dualism and a distaste for his ‘obscuritas artificiosa e formalistica’ [affected and formalistic obscurity].96 The ideological distance between Guittone and Arnaut is self-evident: if Guittone’s poetry of ‘disvolere’ was anathema to Dante, then in Arnaut’s poetry of ‘sobramar’ he found its antithesis. Stylistically, however, we might assume that matters are rather more ambivalent, given both poets’ association with a ‘difficult’ style. While we have seen that Arnaut attempts to fuse stylistic innovation with his poetic razo, however, Guittone’s uses virtuosity to more indulgent and perplexing ends: Deporto – e gioia nel meo core à·pporta e·mmi desporta – al mal c’aggio portato, ch’e’ de porto – saisina aggio, ed aporta ch’e’ ’ntra la porta, – ove for gi, è aportato. (77.1–4; my italics) [Play and joy are brought to my heart and ill is kept at bay, for I have come to a place where I can now enter through the door through which I used to leave.]

This sonnet, with its unrelenting play upon the word porto/porta, is an extreme example of Guittone’s poetic obscurity. Despite the protestations

96 Rea, ‘Guinizzelli praised and explained ’, p. 3. On the ‘closed’ style in Italy, see also Giunta, La poesia italiana, pp. 230–43; Milspaugh.

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of modern Dante critics, Arnaut never wrote poetry of this sort, and nor—despite the formal extravagance of ‘Amor, tu vedi ben’—did Dante. Guittone’s love poetry, to a far greater extent than Arnaut’s, prizes its opacity: Scuro saccio che par lo meo detto; ma che parlo a chi s’entend’ed ame; ché lo ’ngegno mio dà me che me pur prove ’n onne manera, e talent’honne. (XI, 61–6) [I know that my speech appears obscure, but I speak to those who understand and love; for my intellect urges me to try every kind of verse; and I desire to do just that.]

Here, Guittone claims that the obscurity of his writing is pardonable, since he addresses only those able to understand him.97 The rime equivoche (‘par lo . . . parlo’; ‘onne . . . honne’) again typify the sort of rhetorical contrivance that later repelled the ‘stilnovisti’. By contrast, Arnaut, far from presenting his rhetoric as a mark of elitism, claims that his own song would be ‘levet e pla’—light and clear—if only his love were requited: Mant bon chantar levet e pla n’agr’eu fait, si·m feis socors sill que em da joi e·l mi tol (VII, 56–8) [Many a light and easy song I would have composed, had she come to my help, the one who gifts me with joy and takes it away.]

This is the closest Arnaut comes to confessing his adherence to a hermetic style. What is crucial, however, is that he claims to write difficult poetry not due to a desire for obscurity, but because his poetic language must reflect his experience. His verse would indeed be ‘levet e pla’ if he were describing a corresponding love. Despite ostensible similarities, the stylistic values of Arnaut and Guittone are quite distinct.98 Distinct, too, are the profiles that Guittone and Arnaut enjoyed within their respective literary milieux: a further issue that to me seems important in understanding Dante’s sense of kinship with the troubadour. While Guittone was a dominant cultural presence in the Duecento, the contemporary reception of Arnaut’s poetry seems, by contrast, to have been rather unsympathetic, and evidence points to his social and literary estrangement. 97 For Millspaugh the ‘closed style’ of Guittone’s ethical lyrics ‘opens up a textual enclosure that protects virtue from the moral and economic degradation of Italy’s urban centres’ (p. 1). 98 On their stylistic disjuncture, see De Lollis; Rea, ‘Guinizzelli Praised and Explained ’.

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Raimon de Durfort jests at Arnaut’s lack of money and unkempt appearance,99 his vida decries his poetry’s unintelligibility, and the Monk of Montadoun—in his satirical poem about the troubadours—disparages his ‘fols motz’: Ab Arnaut Daniel son set Q’a sa vida be no chantet, Mas us fols motz c’om non enten: Pois la lebre ab lo bou chasset E contra suberna nadet, No val sos chans un aguillen.100 [With Arnaut Daniel there are seven, and he never sang well in his whole life with the exception of a few foolish words which are not understood: since the hare hunted with the ox and he swam against the current, his song is not worth as much as the wild rose.]

These episodes (often cited as further ‘proof ’ of Arnaut’s ‘closed’ style) seem to assume a greater significance in light of the parallel drawn in Purgatorio XXVI between contemporary hostility towards Arnaut and the well-known hostility of Guittone and his followers towards Guinizzelli and his stilnovist successors:101 ‘O frate,’ disse, ‘questi ch’io ti cerno col dito,’ e additò un spirto innanzi, ‘fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno. Versi d’amore e prose di romanzi soverchiò tutti; e lascia dir li stolti che quel di Lemosì credon ch’avanzi. A voce più ch’al ver drizzan li volti, e così ferman sua oppinïone prima ch’arte o ragion per lor s’ascolti. Così fer molti antichi di Guittone, di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio, fin che l’ha vinto il ver con più persone’.

(Purg. XXVI, 115–26)

[‘O brother’, he said, ‘that one whom I point out to you’—and he pointed to a spirit just ahead—‘was a better / the best craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses and in tales of romance he surpassed them all, and let the fools go on who think that fellow from Limoges was better. They favour hearsay over truth and 99

See Topsfield, p. 195. As cited and translated in Topsfield, p. 195. On Guinizzelli’s role as forerunner to the stilnovo, see G. Favati, Inchiesta sul Dolce Stil Novo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1975), pp. 138–48. As is well known, Guinizzelli was attacked by both Bonagiunta and Guittone, while Dante and his peers were condemned by guittoniani such as Onesto da Bologna and Dante da Maiano. 100 101

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thus arrive at their opinions without the use of reason or skill. The same was true of many long ago about Guittone, voice after voice shouting praise of him alone, until for most the truth at last prevailed.’]

Dante here draws an analogy between the unfavourable reception of Arnaut’s poetry in Occitania and the criticism that met the poetry that first challenged the hegemony of guittonismo: in both cases, the later poetry—while disparaged in the first instance—became recognized as the superior form.102 We should recognize that the ‘stolti’ who extolled Giraut (and criticized Arnaut) and the ‘antichi’ who devotedly followed Guittone (and decried the ‘stilnovisti’) were both historically identifiable groups—Giraut, like Guittone in the Italian context, is a dominant presence in thirteenth-century troubadour anthologies.103 In this mini poetic history, Arnaut and the ‘stilnovisti’ appear as poets who challenged and transformed the accepted usage of the ‘parlar materno’, to the chagrin and perplexity of the mob. It is an analogy that also seems pertinent to the Modernists’ admiration for Arnaut: for Pound and Eliot, too, the troubadour’s stylistic imagination was perceived as an antidote to the tired Victorian poetics against which they rebelled. The fact that Dante challenges the view of the ‘stolti’ who derided Arnaut in favour of ‘quel di Lemosì’ not only reflects Dante’s renewed commitment to love poetry, but also underlines the fact that his perception of the troubadour is an atypical one, that he discovered more in Arnaut than strange poems that were not ‘leus ad entendre’. Instead, Arnaut acted as a beacon to Dante in his own struggle against the poetic tide, a struggle evoked by the troubadour’s most famous poetic ‘signature’: Ieu sui Arnaut, q’amas l’aura e chatz la lebre ab lo bou, e nadi contra la suberna. (X, 43–5) [I am Arnaut, who hoards the wind and chases the rabbit with the ox and swims against the swelling tide.]

Topsfield rightly sees these well-known lines as Arnaut ‘declaring his intention to pursue fruitless love and the sterile suffering of his existence’ as he struggles indomitably against the ‘possessive and submerging wave of

102 The ‘più persone’ of line 126 refers, in all likelihood, not to the public, but to other poets: see Giunta, La poesia italiana, pp. 26–9. 103 See E. Poe, ‘The vidas and razos’, in Akehurst and Davis (eds), Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 185–98, who notes how Giraut was presented in these anthologies as ‘the best troubadour of all time, indeed the master of them all’ (p. 186).

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desire’.104 To conclude this section, however, I wish to use this memorable image to reflect not only upon Arnaut’s unrelenting pursuit of erotic fulfilment, but also his quixotic commitment, in the face of a swelling tide of lyric convention, to his singular poetic craft. Arnaut ploughed a lone furrow, and in his conviction and independent-mindedness—reflected in his inimitable poetics—Dante found much to admire. 4.3 ‘MIGLIOR FABBRO’: ARNAUT IN THE COMMEDIA While in the De vulgari and the ‘rime petrose’ Dante engaged with Arnaut without obvious moral considerations, the Commedia naturally requires that he reassess the troubadour’s value. Unlike the poets singled out in Purgatorio XXIV to whom I shall argue he acts as a counterpoint, Arnaut appears in canto XXVI alongside Guido Guinizzelli as a master of eloquentia.105 These poets’ verse transcended stylistic conceit and enjoyed a fluid and fertile relationship with its amatory wellspring, dissolving the ‘nodo’ [knot] that contained lesser writers. Both receive fulsome tributes: Arnaut, of course, is branded ‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ [the finest craftsman of the mother tongue], while Guinizzelli is celebrated by the pilgrim as ‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre’ [father to me and to others, my betters, who ever used love’s sweet and graceful rhymes] (lines 97–9), reflecting his role as forefather to the ‘dolce stil novo’ defined in canto XXIV. This famous canto reflects not only upon the history of the vernacular lyric, but also upon Dante’s own development as a writer, for Guinizzelli and Arnaut appear not simply as great poets, but great poets who exerted their influence upon the Florentine. The ‘dolci detti’ [sweet verses] (112) of Dante’s Guinizzellian ‘stilo della loda’ and the hard-edged ‘rime aspre’ [harsh rhymes] of his ‘petrose’ become, in effect, the poles at either end of the Commedia’s all-encompassing lexical spectrum. With Dante’s former luminaries Guittone and Cavalcanti by now presented as negative models to be left behind, Dante suggests here that, as vernacular models, the legacies of Guinizzelli and Arnaut are unsurpassed.106 Indeed, Dante’s 104

Topsfield, pp. 210–11. Extensive bibliography on this much-discussed canto is provided in Prue Shaw’s recent Lectura in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary, ed. by A. Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, and C. Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 288–302 (pp. 300–2). 106 Of course, Cavalcanti and Guittone remain vital, if suppressed, influences in the Commedia. See Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 173–87. 105

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encounter with these poets, as noted by several critics, effectively dramatizes his own lyric evolution:107 just as the pilgrim’s focus shifts from Guinizzelli to Arnaut, so the ‘sweet’ love poetry ‘fathered’ by Guinizzelli was followed and complemented by the ‘harsh’ craftsmanship of the Arnaldian ‘petrose’.108 The metaliterary implications of Purgatorio XXVI go beyond Dante’s stylistic evolution, however, and extend to questions of thematics. As I discussed in Chapter 3, Dante’s overturning of the hierarchy established by the De vulgari—where the ‘ethical’ Giraut de Bornelh was placed above the ‘erotic’ Arnaut—corresponds to the Commedia’s return to Beatrice and to Dante’s earlier conviction that vernacular poetry must be grounded in love. Thus, as in the De vulgari, the celebration of Arnaut in Purgatorio XXVI comprises two levels: he appears, first, as a decisive technical influence upon Dante; second, as ‘il paradigmatico auctor della Venus’ [the emblematic poet of Love],109 and the counterpoint to Giraut and Guittone, who betrayed the ‘matera amorosa’. As mentioned at the start of the chapter, the canonical reading of Arnaut’s appearance in Purgatorio XXVI argues that, while Dante evidently praises him, the troubadour uses his Occitan speech, which begins with an allusion to Folco of Marseilles, to recant for the indulgence of his ‘closed’ poetry, proclaiming his desire to speak plainly and transposing his words from a clus to a leu key: ‘Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman, qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire. Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, denan. Ara vos prec, per aquella valor que vos guida al som de l’escalina, sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!’ (Purg. XXVI. 140–7) [‘Your courteous question pleases me so much I neither can nor would conceal myself from you. I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way. I see with grief past follies and I see, rejoicing, the joy I hope is coming. Now I pray you, by

107

See Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria’, esp. pp. 1048–50; Marti, ‘Il XXVI del Purgatorio’, pp. 171–2. 108 As noted by Blasucci and Picone, this is reinforced by the order in which the pilgrim encounters the two writers, which corresponds not to the chronological order of their poetic activity, but to the order in which they influenced Dante’s verse: see Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria’, p. 1050; M. Picone, ‘Paradiso IX: Dante, Folchetto e la diaspora trobadorica’, Medioevo Romanzo, VIII (1981–83), 47–89 (p. 48). 109 Picone, ‘La tradizione romanza’, p. 32.

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that power which guides you to the summit of the stairs, to remember, when the time is fit, my pain!’]

It is clear that the simple, formulaic courtly language here does not resemble the rhetorical complexity of Arnaut’s poetry.110 Yet I believe the notion that this constitutes a palinodic rejection of the formerly ‘closed’ style of his poetry has been overstated. First, it seems reasonable to assume that the fact that Dante is writing in neither his nor his readers’ first language informs, at least to some degree, the simplicity of Arnaut’s language, particularly since Dante has to incorporate the troubadour’s Occitan into the Commedia’s metrical scheme. As noted by Nathaniel Smith, every word used by Arnaut has an Italian cognate.111 To me, this seems more suggestive of the importance that Dante ascribes to his readers’ comprehension than an attempt to transpose Arnaut’s style into a leu key. It also seems to have escaped critics’ attention that the very poet to whom Arnaut is declared superior in the canto, Giraut, was well known for promoting the leu style, defending it in opposition to the trobar clus in his tenso with Raimbaut d’Aurenga. Were Dante primarily concerned here with the clus/leu opposition that often preoccupies scholars, this would seem a strange contradiction.112 I agree that Arnaut’s words in the Purgatorio reflect the change caused by the positive effect of Purgatory. However, I see this as manifested not in a change of stylistic register, but a change of content. As Lino Pertile has argued, Arnaut’s ostensibly courtly language assumes a new, Christian

110 I cannot accept Wilhelm’s view that Purgatorio XXVI shows that ‘Dante could write Danielian Provençal almost as perfectly as the master did’: Wilhelm, ‘What Dante May Have Learned’, p. 94. 111 See Smith, pp. 106–7. 112 While Arnaut’s words are seen as assuming an uncharacteristic limpidity, Guinizzelli, known for his ‘dolci detti’, uses conspicuously ‘difficult’ rhymes in this canto (notably -arche and -urgo). Roberto Rea notes how the rhymes marche /imbarche in lines 73–5 not only appear in the sonnet ‘O caro padre meo’ (which Rea reads as attacking Guittone) but also evoke Arnaut, since they appear in lines 3 and 35 of ‘Si·m fos Amors’ (marc /embarc). Indeed, Rea shows that ‘O caro padre meo’ features several Arnaldian rhymes, and argues that the sonnet endorses a trobar car or trobar ric (associated by Rea with Arnaut, combining rimas caras with a clarity of sententia) instead of Guittone’s more opaque trobar clus, which shows little influence of Arnaut and is more indebted to Macabru: ‘Guido non si lascia sfuggire l’opportunità di denunciare come ormai “superata” l’obscuritas rigida e artificiosa del trobar clus guittoniano, additandogli la limpida e raffinata plasticità del trobar car arnaldiano’ [Guido does not miss the opportunity to denounce as ‘surpassed’ the rigid and contrived obscurity of the Guittonian trobar clus, pointing him instead to the limpid and refined flexibility of Arnaut’s trobar car] (p. 11). In this sense Guido’s perspective in the canto is not palinodic, as suggested by critics such as Contini and Wilkins, but rather his dismissal of Guittone and endorsement of Arnaut might be seen to correspond to his stylistic preferences while he was alive.

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significance on the terrace of the lustful,113 redirected from the erotic object of the lady to the spiritual object: the celestial, and no longer the sexual, ‘joi qu’esper’. I believe the sense of ‘cobrir’—integral to the argument that Arnaut ‘rejects’ the trobar clus—pertains not to his formerly closed style, but to his shift from courtly to divine love. There is no clear evidence to suggest that this verb has anything to do with style. Tellingly, Dante’s only other use of ‘cobrir’ (in the form of its Italian antonym: ‘discovrire’) comes in the context of keeping secret his use of screen ladies in the Vita nova,114 while Beltrami notes that the only use of ‘cobrir’ in the troubadour corpus comes in a canso by Folco, also referring to his use of screen ladies.115 No other troubadour used this verb at all, let alone in the very particular stylistic sense that commentators suggest. ‘Cobrir’, furthermore, carries sexual connotations in an Italian lyric context. We need only think back to Chapter 3, and Guittone’s line ‘ma chesta t’ò volendoti covrire’ [but I have asked you wanting to straddle you] (81.7), or to Dante’s use of ‘copertoio’ [bedclothes] (Rime 26, line 8) in his crude tenzone with Forese Donati. The importance of ‘cobrir’ derives, then, from the fact that it reflects Arnaut’s transition from earthly to divine love, as a ‘covert’ courtly eros is transformed into a ‘disclosed’ caritas.116 Above all, however, there would seem to be a disquieting tension between the very notion that Purgatorio XXVI condemns Arnaut as a poetic obscurantist and his billing as a master of poetry in the vernacular. As we know, Dante was concerned with establishing a fluidity between 113 ‘[Arnaut’s] words (plor, cantan, consiros, folor, joi, valor, dolor), while alluding to the technical vocabulary of courtly love and trobar clus, all pertain, antiphrastically, to the new semantics of purgation’: L. Pertile, ‘XXVI’, in Lectura Dantis Virginiana: Introductory Readings, ed. by T. Wlassics, 3 vols (Charlottesville: Bailey, 1995), II, 380–97 (p. 395). I question here, however, whether Arnaut’s words here pertain to the trobar clus. Allegretti shows how Arnaut’s speech resembles a stanza of a troubadour canso: P. Allegretti, ‘La stanza provenzale di Purgatorio XXVI’, in Atti del XXI Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Romanza, ed. by G. Ruffino (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), pp. 3–15. On the lexical connections between Arnaut’s speech and that of Ulysses in Inferno XXVI, see the essay by Mocan. 114 ‘ne la seconda [parte del sonetto] dico quello ch’elli [Amore] mi disse, avvegna che non compiutamente per tema ch’avea di discovrire lo mio secreto’ [in the second I relate what he told me—only in part, however, for fear of revealing my secret] (VN IX, 13). 115 Beltrami, p. 52. Folco writes: ‘S’ieu no·m sai cobrir, qui m’er cubrire?’ (V, 32) [If I am not able to ‘cover’ myself, who will ‘cover’ me?]. Barolini (Dante’s Poets, p. 117) in fact suggests that ‘cobrir’ might be seen—like Arnaut’s opening words ‘Tan m’abellis’ (a clear allusion to Folco’s canso ‘Tant m’abellis l’amoros pessamens’)—as an anticipation of the appearance of Folco in the Paradiso. 116 Barolini writes: ‘to serve God we must put aside the strategies of closure that govern human love; we must uncover—or discover—ourselves, and stand revealed’ (pp. 118–19). In this light, we might note the ‘disclosure’ again described in Dante’s exchange with Folco in the Heaven of Venus: ‘ “Dio vede tutto, e tuo veder s’inluia,” / diss’io “beato spirto, sì che nulla / voglia di sé a te puot’ esser fuia” ’ (Par. IX, 73–5).

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vernacular poetry and love, transcending what he saw as the incongruity between the two that he believed blighted some of his predecessors. This is, of course, encapsulated in Purgatorio XXIV, where Dante famously defines his praxis so that Bonagiunta, his interlocutor, might understand the ‘nodo’ that prevented him (along with Guittone and Giacomo da Lentini) from achieving the ‘dolce stil novo’ that Dante introduced to the Italian lyric:117 ‘Ma dì s’i’ veggio qui colui che fore trasse le nove rime, cominciando “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” ’. E io a lui: ‘I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando’ ‘O frate, issa vegg’io’, diss’ elli, ‘il nodo che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’odo! Io veggio ben come le vostre penne di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, che de le nostre certo non avvenne; e qual più a gradire oltre si mette, non vede più da l’uno a l’altro stilo’; e, quasi contentato, si tacette. (Purg. XXIV, 49–62) [‘But tell me if I see before me the one who brought forth those new rhymes begun with “Ladies who have intelligence of love” .’ And I to him: ‘I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and as he dictates deep within me, so I set forth.’ ‘O my brother’, he said, ‘now I understand the knot that kept the notary, Guittone, and me on this side of the sweet new style I hear. I clearly understand that your pens follow faithfully whatever Love may dictate, which, to be sure, was not the case with ours. And he who takes the next step sees in this what separates the one style from the other.’ Then, as though with satisfaction, he was silent.]

While the pilgrim’s conversation with Bonagiunta is sweeping in its literary historiography and controversial in its precise meaning, it nevertheless offers a vital perspective on some of Dante’s poetic ideals. Dante famously describes how his poetry simply ‘transcribes’ what Love dictates to him, suggesting that harmony between his (amatory) source of inspiration and means of expression, and an affinity between Dante and the ‘inspired’ human authors of Scripture.118 117 As has been widely noted, Bonagiunta’s acknowledgement that this ‘dolce stil novo’ is a superior poetic style seems to represent a palinode of sorts: Bonagiunta had attacked the stilnovist forefather Guinizzelli’s ‘iscura . . . parlatura’ in his sonnet ‘Voi, ch’avete mutata la mainera’. 118 See Chapter 2, n. 81.

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There are at least three bones of exegetical contention here: first, whether the ‘vostre’ is plural or honorific (that is, does Bonagiunta refer just to Dante’s ‘dolce stil novo’, or to a new ‘school’ of poets?); second, whether Dante refers to his praxis in composing ‘Donne ch’avete’ or rather the Commedia; third, whether the Love to which he refers is human, divine, or perhaps both. It would be hard, in my view, to dissociate the lines from the poetics of ‘Donne ch’avete’ or of the Commedia. Barolini argues that the passage refers at once to the lyric Dante of the Vita nova and to the author of the ‘poema sacro’: ‘The “dittator” of Purgatorio XXIV, 59—Amor—is . . . an analogue, within the lyric and amatory sphere, of the other dittator—God, also Amor—within the poem’s overall structure.’119 Barański, meanwhile, argues that Dante and Bonagiunta are, in effect, talking about different things: that is, while Bonagiunta refers to the lyric ‘stilnovo’ and its erotic poetics, lines 52–4 in fact refer to Dante-poeta’s decision in the Commedia to forego ‘artificial rules of composition’ in order to transcribe faithfully his divinely ordained vision.120 Barański thus regards the ‘I’ mi son un . . .’ passage as a definition of the poem’s ‘comic’ plurilingualism, its non-adherence to the genera dicendi that inevitably limit the communicative power and veracity of poetic language.121 Given Dante’s reference to ‘li altri miei miglior’ (line 98) in describing his indebtedness to the ‘stilnovist’ figurehead Guinizzelli in Purgatorio XXVI, and the clear sense of alliance between the (anti-Guittonian) Tuscans of the late Duecento, I believe Bonagiunta probably does refer here to a new ‘school’ of poets. However, I think the ambiguity caused by ‘vostre’ is likely to be deliberate on Dante’s part. In the context of the journey taken by the pilgrim in 1300, Bonagiunta and Dante discuss the transition from the formulaic, courtly Italian lyric to the ‘sweet new style’ of the Tuscan ‘stilnovisti’, influenced by Guinizzelli, who professed to have a profound understanding of Amor. Yet Dante also takes the opportunity (and here the ‘vostre’ can be construed as honorific) to reflect upon his own praxis in composing the ‘poema sacro’, whereby he rejects arbitrary rhetorical norms to follow the dictates of an inspiration at once erotic and divine. Thus, Dante and Bonagiunta’s respective references— 119

Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 90. ‘Now that [Bonagiunta] shares the pilgrim’s general opinion about the need for poets to heed their “dittator”, he mistakenly believes that this also means they share a common view of poetry’: Barański, ‘’nfiata labbia’, p. 29. Barański contends that the Commedia—far from eulogizing the libello—suggests that it failed on an ethical (and thus a literary) level: ‘For all the emphasis on the heavenly character of Beatrice, Donne ch’avete, and by extension the Vita Nuova, were not the stuff out of which divine literature is made. If they had been, Dante would not have been tempted by the donna gentile and other “immagini . . . false” ’ (‘’infiata labbia’, p. 32). See also Barański, ‘The “New Life” of “Comedy” ’, esp. pp. 12–15. 121 See Barański, ‘’nfiata labbia’, p. 33. 120

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first, to the composition of the Commedia and, second, to the opposition between the older generation of poets and the ‘stilnovisti’—need not contradict one another. Either way, Dante suggests that previous Italian poets were concerned less with love (whether erotic or divine) than with literary contrivance.122 In Dante’s own poetry, by contrast, we witness a ‘new’ fluidity between language and love, a properly inspired vernacular poetics, whether in the limpid love poetry of ‘Donne ch’avete’ or the unbound, divinely sanctioned plurilingualism of the poem before us. Dante’s exchange with Bonagiunta is therefore not only an affirmation of Dante’s poetic superiority, but also a definition of what he believes lyric poetry in the vernacular ought to be: namely, the unadulterated product of love. I believe this credo must impinge upon Dante’s treatment of Arnaut, and serve to undermine the notion that Dante’s admiration for the troubadour might be restricted to his appreciation of a formal mastery that he came to view, in the Commedia, as somehow hollow or indulgent: such poetry, surely, would fail to overcome this ‘nodo’. We have now seen that—for all its difficulty—Arnaut’s poetry toils to match language and inspiration: an endeavour that I believe accounts for his privileged status in Dante’s work. He was, in this sense, both a proto-‘stilnovist’ (one who saw vernacular poetry as intrinsically rooted in subjective desire, and who claims to possess a unique identification with his creative source) and, in his inclusive approach to poetic language, a vital, though exclusively secular, precursor to the ‘comic’ Dante. My argument here diverges from a reading of these two cantos by Barański, who argues that the term ‘dolce’ in Purgatorio XXIV denotes the ‘leu’ poetics (i.e. the concern with clarity) that characterizes the ‘new style’ (i.e. ‘comedy’) that Dante associates with his poem, and that the three poets who failed to achieve this style were ‘restrained’ by their commitment to ‘clus’ poetics.123 While Barański convincingly links the Italian term ‘dolce’ to the Occitan ‘leu’ (and ‘doutz’), my reading of Dante’s poetic claims and judgements here is rather different. If Dante believed Arnaut was responsible for what Barański describes as ‘selfindulgent hermetic poetry’, why would he be championed two cantos later as ‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ at the expense of the leu poet Giraut? Why would Bonagiunta be attacked on the basis of his failure to employ the leu style, when he had defended precisely that style in 122 This is closely linked to the poetic evolution we saw in the Vita nova, where Dante moves from the derivative, Guittonian courtly tropes of the earlier chapters to a form of poetry whose genesis appears divinely inspired. Differences between the self-definition of Purgatorio XXIV and the account of the genesis of ‘Donne ch’avete’ in the libello are noted in Barański’s reading (‘’nfiata labbia’, p. 24). 123 Barański, ‘’nfiata labbia’, pp. 25–7.

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opposition to the ‘iscura . . . parlatura’ [obscure speech] of the ‘dolce’ poet par excellence Guinizzelli?124 And, for all its undoubted concern with clarity, could the Commedia itself accurately be classified as leu? While ‘dolce’ also carries a spiritual resonance,125 references to ‘dolcezza’ in Dante’s stylistic reflection point less to questions of clarity and obscurity than to questions of lexis and phonics. Guinizzelli—often lexically mellifluous yet intellectually demanding—is the prime example of a poet who can be both ‘dolce’ and ‘difficult’ (‘iscuro’, to use Bonagiunta’s term: surely the opposite of leu).126 The antonym of ‘dolce’, I would suggest, is not ‘clus’ but ‘aspro’: the harsh-sounding register of the spiritually barren ‘rime petrose’ and Cocytus. Barański claims that stylistic ‘difficulty’—whether in Arnaut or in Dante’s ‘rime petrose’—is evidence of a failure to match form and content, to ‘undo’ the ‘nodo’. My reading of Arnaut here frames the troubadour’s importance to Dante in rather different terms, and argues that for both poets style cannot be isolated from the love it describes. Reducing the ‘difficulty’ of Arnaut or of the ‘rime petrose’ to hollow ornamentation distracts us from what is most important in Dante and Arnaut’s relationship. Indeed, I believe that it is precisely the bond between language and desire in Arnaut’s poetry—its very capacity to undo the expressive ‘nodo’ of canto XXIV, its very fidelity to its dittator—that informs Dante’s remarkable decision to allow the troubadour to speak in the Purgatorio in his native Occitan. Cestaro’s Kristevan reading of Dante’s use of the ‘fluid’ vernacular in the Commedia describes the troubadour’s speech as ‘the semiotic eruption of the nurse-mother’s tongue onto the page’.127 This is a view I strongly support, and I hope this chapter has shown why Dante might afford such a privilege to Arnaut. Arnaut’s use of Occitan is a celebration of the nucleus of language, desire, and subjectivity—particular to poetry in the mother tongue—which, prior to Dante, had reached its apogee in the troubadour’s verse. Despite its clear negative moral implications, Arnaut’s residence on the terrace of the lustful (in contrast with Bonagiunta’s unaccounted-for presence among the gluttons) seems to attest to the veracity of his love poetry, to his profound identification with his profane creative source. 124

I again refer to the sonnet ‘Voi ch’avete mutata la mainera’. On Bonagiunta’s limpid style, see Giunta, La poesia italiana; D. Pierantozzi, ‘Bonagiunta Orbicciani campione del “trobar leu” ’, Convivium, 17 (1948), 873–87. 125 Consider ‘il dolce’ which fills Dante when he comes face to face with God in Par. XXXIII, 63. 126 Rea (‘Guinizzelli Praised and Explained ’) indeed shows the overlooked stylistic affinities between Guinizzelli and Arnaut. 127 Cestaro, p. 142.

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Like Arnaut and Guinizzelli themselves, however, the celebration of poetry atop Mount Purgatory can only go so far. The treatment of the vernacular lyric in Purgatorio XXVI, much like the treatment of the classical world in Inferno IV, is profoundly double-edged. For, while Purgatorio XXVI celebrates two of Dante’s vernacular maestri, it simultaneously proclaims—through the workings of divine justice—the futility of their literary enterprises. Their poetry did not lead them to Heaven, but to the terrace where souls repent for ‘seguendo come bestie l’appetito’ [following their appetites like beasts] (Purg. XXVI, 84). Thus, Arnaut and Guinizzelli are confined by a second, spiritual ‘nodo’: the ring of fire that contains them. Critics now acknowledge that they are placed among the lussuriosi not on account of physical acts of lust or particular poems, but a poetic commitment to—in the words of Blasucci—‘un eros che, per quanto ispirato a un’etica raffinamente cortese, non seppe elevarsi al di sopra delle sue premesse irrazionali e passionali’ [an eros that, however much it was inspired by a refined courtly ethos, was unable to transcend its irrational and lustful basis].128 No lines in Arnaut’s poetry better encapsulate this than the closing lines of stanza 5 of ‘L’aur’amara’, where the lover-poet vows to love his lady as fervently as the devoted citizens of Domme love God. In Arnaut’s poetry, the lady lords over the poet-lover, and it is this unreconstructed submission to a carnal deity that, in the Commedia, constitutes his sin. Purgatorio XXVI is where two axes—the one moral, the other literary— intersect: it is torn between worldly celebration and eschatological censure, between Guinizzelli and Arnaut’s need to transcend their poetic pasts and their (and Dante’s) nostalgic attachment to them. The ambivalent treatment of Arnaut and the simultaneous presence in Purgatorio XXVI of both moral and literary values points forward to the integration of Christianity and vernacular love poetry (an integration lacking in the poetry of Guinizzelli and Arnaut) to which Dante fundamentally aspires. Purgatorio XXVI thus shows poetic ‘worth’ to be more complicated than canto XXIV had seemed to suggest. Love is, indeed, the source of great poetry, but not love as Arnaut and Guinizzelli’s knew it. It would be all too easy, then, to claim that, in the Commedia, moral engagement must supplant erotic commitment. But this does not help moral poets like Guittone or Giraut. In his championing of Arnaut and Guinizzelli, Dante intimates the presence of an anti-Guittonian continuum between the erotic literature of his youth (and his forerunners) and the ‘sacred’ project upon which he now embarks; a link, as it were, between the 128

Blasucci, ‘Autobiografia letteraria’, p. 1054.

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problem and the solution. What I hope has become clear in this book so far is that Dante seeks a synthesis of eros and spirituality, that embodied desire and selfhood—for all the moral complications they present—must remain integral aspects of an inspired vernacular poetics, even in a poem with divine aspirations. The ultimate implication of Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI is that only Dante, in writing his divinely sanctioned (love) poem, will undo the two ‘nodi’—the one expressive, the other spiritual—at stake. Dante’s ultimate objective in the Commedia is to write a spiritually viable poem that nonetheless remains faithful to his worldly credo that lyric poetry in the vernacular should act as an outpouring of inner desire. He seeks, in other words, to redeem the model lyric praxis—one that fuses language, desire, and selfhood. No previous poet had better exemplified this praxis in its fallen incarnation than Arnaut Daniel, and it is for this reason—and not simply because of his technical proficiency—that Dante crowns him ‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’.

5 Folco of Marseilles The contrasting cases of Guittone and Arnaut have drawn attention to the distinctive harmonization of eros and spirituality that Dante sees as securing his preeminence as a vernacular poet.1 In very different ways, Arnaut’s and Guittone’s writings were predicated upon an insoluble tension between erotic and spiritual impulses, and both serve as counterpoints to Dante in his elaboration of an integrative poetics. In comparison with the other vernacular poets who feature in the Commedia, Folco of Marseilles, who appears as a character in the Paradiso, has received rather less critical attention.2 He has often been seen as detached from the metapoetic discourse, and especially the meditation on love poetry, that can be traced through the second half of the Purgatorio. I shall argue in this chapter, however, that he plays an integral role in Dante’s reflection upon the relationship between his own poetry and the values of the pre-existing lyric tradition, helping to reinforce from further perspectives the overarching claims of this book. Folco (to use the appellation deployed by Dante in Paradiso IX) was born in the latter half of the twelfth century to a wealthy family in Genoa, and went on to enjoy considerable fame—first as a love poet and later as a 1 References to Folco’s work are taken from Folchetto di Marsiglia, Le poesie di Folchetto di Marsiglia, ed. by P. Squillacioti (Pisa: Pacini, 1999). Translations are my own. 2 Various scholars have considered Folco’s importance to Dante and aspects of his appearance in the Commedia: see especially Asperti; Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 114–22; Beltrami; Bergin; Cherchi, ‘Dante e i trovatori’; M. Picone, ‘Paradiso IX: Dante, Folchetto e la diaspora trobadorica’, Medioevo romanzo, VIII (1981–1983), 47–89; A. L. Rossi, ‘ “E pos d’amor plus no·m cal”: Ovidian Exemplarity and Folco’s Rhetoric of Love in Paradiso IX’, Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX, 5 (1989), 49–102; P. Squillacioti, ‘Folchetto di Marsiglia “Trovatore di Dante”: Tant m’abellis l’amoros pessamens’, in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 11 (1993), 583–607; F. Suitner, ‘Due trovatori nella Commedia: Bertran de Born e Folchetto di Marsiglia’, Atti della Accademia nazionale dei lincei: Memorie: Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 24 (1980), 579–643; G. Toja, ‘Il canto di Folchetto di Marsiglia’, Convivium, 34 (1966), 234–56; A. Viscardi, ‘Folchetto’, in ED, II, 954–6. For biographical studies of the poet and bishop, see N. M. Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150–1231) (New York and London: Routledge, 2001); N. Zingarelli, La personalità storica di Folchetto di Marsiglia nella Commedia di Dante (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1898).

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churchman and bishop. His biography as recounted in his vida is intriguing and raises a number of issues and tensions under consideration in the present study: Folquet do Marsseilla si fo fillz d’un mercadier, que fo de Genoa et ac nom ser Anfos. E qan lo paire muric si·l laisset molt ric d’aver. Et el entendet en pretz et en valor, e mes se a servir als valenz barons et als valens homes, et a brigar ab lor, et a dar et a servir et a venir et a anar. E fort fo grazitz et onratz per lo rei Richart et per lo comte Raimon de Tolosa e per En Barral, lo sieu seingnor de Marseilla. Mout trobava ben e molt fo avinenz om de la persona. Et entendia se en la muiller del sieu seingnor En Barral, e pregava la e fasia sas chansos d’ella. Mas anc per precs ni per cansos no·i poc trobar merce, qu’ella li fezes nuill ben en dreit d’amor; per que totz temps se plaing d’amor en soas cansos. Et avenc si que la domna muric, et En Barals, lo maritz d’ella e·l seingner de lui, qui tant li fasia d’onor, e·l bons reis Richartz, e·l bons coms Raimos de Tolosa, e·l reis Amfos d’Arragon. Don el, per tristessa de la soa dompna e dels princes que vos ai ditz, abandonet lo mon e si se rendet a l’orde de Cistel ab sa muiller e ab dos sos fillz qu’el avia. E si fo faichs abas d’una rica abadia qu’es en Proensa, que a nom Torondet. E pois el fo faichs evesques de Tolosa, e lai el muric.3 [Folquet of Marseilles was the son of a merchant from Genoa named Anfos. And when his father died, he inherited many riches. And yet [Folquet] was interested in honour and virtue, and began to serve worthy barons and men. And he was much esteemed by king Richard and by Raymond of Toulouse and by Barral: his feudal lord in Marseilles. He was a fine poet and a charming individual. And he was enamoured with the wife of his lord Barral. And he prayed for her and wrote songs about her. Yet neither through prayers nor through songs did he gain her mercy, and his love remained unrequited; thus, his songs describe the pains of love. And then his lady died, as did Barral, her husband and his lord, whom he so esteemed, and the good king Richard and the good Count Raymond, and King Anfos of Aragon. Thus, out of sadness, he abandoned his wealth, and joined a Cistercian order with his wife and their two sons. And he became Abbot of Torondet in Provence, and then Bishop of Toulouse, where he died.]

The information provided in the vida appears to be substantially accurate, consistent with other contemporary accounts of Folco’s life. It is a significant document, moreover, as it has been seen to resonate in a number of early commentaries on Dante’s Commedia,4 while its emphasis also seems 3

As cited in Squillacioti, Le poesie, p. 65. See Squillacioti, Le poesie, p. 65. Suitner (pp. 620–2) shows how this vida influenced medieval readers’ understanding of Folco, noting convincing links to it in several fourteenth-century commentaries on the Commedia. 4

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consistent with the man presented to us in the Paradiso itself. Folco inherited substantial riches (‘molt ric d’aver’) from his merchant father, yet was more interested in acquiring virtue (‘pretz’ and ‘valor’) than monetary wealth. The et separating ‘riches’ and ‘virtue’ here, says Picone, is ‘fortemente avversativo’ [strongly adversative] and establishes a powerful dichotomy between ‘l’eredità materiale del padre e la richezza spirituale cercata dal figlio’ [the material inheritance of the father and the spiritual riches searched for by the son],5 between the worldly and the spiritual—a first indication of a kind of proto-Guittonian dualism that I see as characterizing the troubadour’s poetic itinerary. Folco dedicated himself to serving men of great worth, such as his feudal lord Barral, Richard the Lionheart, and Raymond of Toulouse. But the second paragraph tells us that he also gave much time to songs of unrequited love, written for Barral’s own wife Adelais. The turning point in Folco’s life is described in the final paragraph. Following the deaths of Adelais, Barral, Richard, and Raymond, Folco recognized the futility of earthly love and secular ambition, and in 1195 abandoned his worldly possessions in favour of a life of devotion in a Cistercian monastery.6 His career in the Church was ultimately dedicated less to cloistral reflection than to decisive public activity: he became Bishop of Toulouse in 1205 and played a central role in the crusades against the Albigensian heretics, earning the esteem of Saint Dominic and Pope Innocent III as a powerful preacher and defender of the faith.7 It appears that Folco only briefly explored the possibilities of poetry in these post-conversion years. There survive two crusade songs, ‘Chantars mi torna ad afan’ [Singing for me turns into pain] (XIV) and ‘Oimais no i conosc razo’ [Now I see no reason] (XVIII),8 that describe ‘an unusually defined sense of the futility of earthly life and earthly love’ and recant his former commitment to Amor.9 Nevertheless, his bipartite corpus, while lacking symmetry, suggestively corresponds to the trajectory of his spiritual journey. Interestingly, Franco Suitner notes that these crusade poems were often found at the end of collections of Folco’s 5

Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 72 (my translation). The date of this conversion is provided by contemporary Latin chronicles: see S. Stroński, Le Troubadour Folquet de Marseille (Krakow: Edition du fonds Oslawski, 1910), 100–13. Stroński (p. 113) cites a thirteenth-century sermon that describes how Folco did penance every time he heard his pre-conversion poetry, underlining the schism between his love poetry and his career in the Church. 7 See Zingarelli, La personalità storica, p. 10. Folco was, he says, ‘veramente famoso’ in his day (p. 12). 8 The two final poems attributed to Folco in Squillacioti’s edition—‘Vers Dieus, el vostre nom e de sancta Maria’ (XXVI) and ‘Senher Dieu[s], que fezist Adam’ (XXVII)—are liturgical works but remain of uncertain authorship. 9 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 119. 6

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poetry in medieval chansonniers, reinforcing the sense of a poetic, as well as spiritual, conversion.10 Indeed, this movement away from fin’amor is especially stark and pronounced in the case of a troubadour who not only abandoned love poetry, but also played a central role in the Albigensian Crusades, in which the culture that fostered the poetry of the troubadours was brutally condemned as heretical. While a very popular troubadour in the Middle Ages, in Italy as well as France,11 Folco has interested scholars less than Arnaut. With the exception of a planh written to mark the death of Barral in 1192, the cansos of his early corpus focus entirely on fin’amor and, while rhetorically sophisticated,12 may appear formulaic in comparison with the stylistic and formal innovations associated with his fellow troubadour.13 Folco nonetheless occupies an important place in Dante’s work. First, his canso ‘Tant m’abellis l’amoros pessamens’ [The amorous thought so pleases me] (II) is cited in the De vulgari eloquentia on account of its elegant construction (DVE II, vi, 5–6). Indeed, Dante appears to have attended closely to this canso, to which I shall return shortly, over a number of years. As well as its appearance in the De vulgari, Paolo Squillacioti notes echoes of the lyric in the Vita nova (in the sonnet ‘Gentil pensero’), the Convivio (in the canzone ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’), and in the Commedia—not only in Arnaut’s speech in Purgatorio XXVI but also in Virgil’s line ‘Tanto m’aggrada il tuo commandamento’ [Your command so pleases me] in Inferno II (line 79).14 Nonetheless, it is clear that Folco was a minor poetic influence on Dante in comparison with Arnaut. While Arnaut is mentioned four times in the De vulgari eloquentia, and receives the mantle of foremost Occitan love poet, Folco is mentioned only once in a list of 10

See Suitner, pp. 632–3. Suitner describes Folco as ‘uno dei trovatori in assoluto più conosciuti ed imitati del nostro medio evo’ [unquestionably one of the most known and imitated troubadours of the Italian Middle Ages] (p. 619). See also Viscardi, p. 955. 12 For examples of Folco’s elaborate wordplay, see Suitner, p. 643. Viscardi argues that his poetry reflects an assiduous study of the trivium, the classical auctores, and the most distinguished troubadours (p. 955). 13 See for example Viscardi: ‘Ai moderni . . . non pare che la poesia di Folchetto si distingua dalla genericità della scuola’ [To us moderns, the poetry of Folco does not stand out from the norms of his school] (p. 955). 14 See Squillacioti, ‘Trovatore di Dante’, pp. 587–90. As shown by various critics, especially Suitner and Zingarelli, Folco enjoyed considerable fame in the later Middle Ages, both as a religious figure and as a troubadour, and there can be no doubt that Dante was aware of his stature in both these roles. We cannot be sure how much of Folco’s poetry Dante was acquainted with. The De vulgari and the Commedia show that he admired the canso ‘Tant m’abellis’, while convincing links have been noted between Paradiso IX and Folco’s crusade poetry. We should acknowledge the possibility, however, that Dante’s knowledge of the troubadour’s love poetry went little further, for there is no hard evidence to suggest otherwise. 11

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eleven poets; and while Dante manifestly bears the influence of Arnaut, and engages with his writings in a careful and sophisticated manner, no phase of Dante’s lyric production bears Folco’s stamp in the same way. Some years after the citation of ‘Tant m’abellis’ in the De vulgari, Folco appears as a character in canto IX of the Paradiso. The only vernacular poet besides Dante to appear in the final canticle, Folco is located in the third sphere of Paradise, the Heaven of Venus, whose souls, despite an inclination to excessive erotic love, emerged in life as passionate servants of God. Paradiso IX would appear to lack the metapoetic richness of Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI, and indeed Folco’s identity as a love poet, far from being interrogated here, seems to be effaced. While he could thus be identified as among the least important of the Commedia’s vernacular poets in terms of Dante’s own development as a writer, it is nonetheless Folco, of all these writers, whose character speaks the greatest number of lines (sixty) in the poem. He appears alongside Cunizza, a thirteenth-century Italian woman who repented for her myriad love affairs to carry out charitable deeds, and Rahab, the biblical harlot who gave shelter to Joshua’s army during the destruction of Jericho. It is Cunizza who first introduces Folco, comparing him to a shining jewel in the sunlight (‘qual fin balasso in che lo sol percuota’ [a splendid ruby, sparkling in the bright rays of the sun]: Par. IX, 69). Vincenzo Cioffari, in his analysis of precious stone imagery in the Commedia, notes that the balas ruby was a symbol of ardent love in the Middle Ages, and also a stone that could diminish or cure lustful thoughts, subtly reinforcing Folco’s association with lust.15 His own speech takes up the second half of canto IX. First, he periphrastically reveals his birthplace, Genoa, describes his erotic passion with reference to three classical exemplars, and elaborates upon his experience of beatitude. Later, prompted by the presence of Rahab, he closes the canto with a trenchant invective against Florentine and papal avarice: Ben si convenne lei lasciar per palma in alcun cielo de l’alta vittoria che s’acquistò con l’una e l’altra palma, perch’ ella favorò la prima gloria di Iosüè in su la Terra Santa, che poco tocca al papa la memoria. La tua città, che di colui è pianta che pria volse le spalle al suo fattore e di cui è la ’nvidia tanto pianta, produce e spande il maladetto fiore 15 See V. Cioffari, ‘Dante Use of Lapidaries: A Source Study’, DS, 109 (1991), 149–62 (pp. 152–3).

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[Fitting it was indeed to leave her in one heaven, a trophy of the lofty victory He gained with both of His two palms, because she aided Joshua when he gained his first triumph in the Holy Land—a place that hardly touches the memory of the pope. Your city, which was planted by him, the first to turn his back upon his Maker and from whose envy comes such great distress, puts forth and spreads the accursed flower that has led astray both sheep and lambs, for it has made a wolf out of its shepherd. For it the Gospels and the lofty doctors are neglected and the Decretals alone are studied, as is readily apparent from their margins. To it the pope and his cardinals devote themselves, without a single thought for Nazareth, where Gabriel spread out his wings. But Vatican hill and other Roman places that became a burial-ground for the soldiery that followed Peter, will soon be free of this adultery.]

Folco describes here the depths to which the Church has sunk since Joshua’s crusade (his ‘prima gloria’): it now ignores the Holy Land (‘non vanno i lor pensieri a Nazarette’), which has lamentably slipped from its grasp. There is no doubt—in the eyes of the former troubadour, or of Dante the poet—what is to blame for the Church’s present neglect of its responsibilities, as he swiftly turns his attention to the ills caused by avarice. The principal origin of this sin is Florence, cast as the city of the devil, the plant of ‘colui . . . che pria volse le spalle al suo fattore’. The ‘cursed’ Florin, currency of Dante’s native city, has corrupted the clergy (the ‘pastore’), which now focuses not upon the Gospels or Patristics, but the Decretals: books of canon law used to ensure greater material gain.16 Thus, the Church acts not as a spiritual shepherd, but a treacherous wolf, whose flock lives in constant peril. The canto ends with a prophecy that tells us that Rome will soon be spared the ravages of cupidity. This recalls previous prophecies in the Commedia, in particular the reference to the 16 Cassell notes that almost all popes in Dante’s time were, in fact, canon lawyers: see A. Cassell, The ‘Monarchia’ Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), pp. 12–13.

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coming of the ‘veltro’ [greyhound] in Inferno I and the ‘DXV’ in Purgatorio XXXIII, in apparently foretelling the coming of a restorative imperial ruler.17 The description of the Church’s fiscal corruption as ‘adultery’, meanwhile, echoes the denunciation of the simoniacal papacy (‘le cose di Dio . . . e voi rapaci / per oro e per argento avolterate’ [you who, hungry for gold and silver, prostitute the things of God: Inf. XIX, 2–4]), as well as descriptions of the papacy’s lascivious dalliance with the French, both in Inferno XIX (‘puttaneggiar coi regi’ [committing fornication with the kings]: line 108) and in the Earthly Paradise, where the Church appears as a ‘puttana sciolta’ [dishevelled harlot] (Purg. XXXII, 149). Evidently, while Folco’s heaven carries associations with erotic love, his speech ultimately pertains much more to the poem’s ethical and political political than to its amatory discourse. Perhaps the key question we must consider in relation to Folco is what accounts for his presence in Paradise and in this particular heaven. How, in other words, does his salvation relate to his poetic past and, moreover, to Dante’s own poetic identity? Some of Dante’s early commentators believed Folco was found in Venus because of the achievements of his love poetry, because—in the words of Jacopo della Lana—‘disse molto bene d’amore’ [he wrote very well about love].18 Modern critics largely reject this verdict, however, and believe that Folco appears in Paradiso IX as the fervent bishop of his later years—his identity as a troubadour altogether surpassed. This seems to be confirmed by his appellation in the poem: ‘Folco mi disse quella gente a cui / fu noto il nome mio’ [Folco the people called me, if they knew my name] (Par. IX, 94–5, my italics). As discussed by Picone and Squillacioti, codicological evidence shows that ‘Folco’ was the name associated with his religious career, while ‘Folquet’ was that associated with his love poetry. Indeed, while we could easily view Folco merely as a mouthpiece through whom Dante can condemn two of his personal bêtes noires—degenerate Florence and the corrupted papacy19—critics have in fact come to see him as a character grounded in historical reality, noting convincing parallels and links between the Commedia’s invective and Folco’s own post-conversion writings, particularly concerning avarice.20 17

While some commentators have suggested that this prophecy calls for a new crusade, a definitive interpretation is ultimately impossible, given the intentionally oblique prophetic language used. 18 DDP: Jacopo della Lana (1324–1328), commentary on Paradiso IX, 109–14. 19 This is the view of Coletti: see F. Coletti, Lectura Dantis Scagliera: il canto IX del Paradiso (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965), p. 43. 20 See P. Allegretti, ‘Canto IX’, in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. by G. Güntert and M. Picone (Florence: Cesati, 2002), pp. 133–44 (p. 138); Barolini, Dante’s Poets,

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Yet while there is a modern consensus that Folco appears in the Paradiso as a bishop and not as a love poet, critics offer different perspectives on the poetic implications of his role in the Commedia. Some argue that Dante not only celebrates Folco as Bishop, but—in so doing—presents poetic concerns as entirely incidental to Paradiso IX. One such critic is Stefano Asperti, who argues that Folco is saved by Dante purely on account of his surpassing of courtly poetry ‘attraverso una scelta esistenziale’ [through an existential choice].21 The standing of the love lyric in the Commedia is crystallized in Arnaut, ‘in una dimensione profana, temporale, immanente, che non permette di superare la transizione purgatoriale e richiede il passaggio nel “foco che affina”’ [in a profane and temporal dimension, unable to survive the process of purgation and requiring passage through the refining flames].22 The Folco we encounter in Paradise belongs, Asperti claims, not to the Commedia’s discourse on love poetry but rather to that of politics: a ‘corrected’ version of the Inferno’s warmongering political poet Bertran de Born.23 A slightly different argument is put forth by Barolini, who divides Folco’s speech into two contrasting sections, reflecting his dichotomous life and poetic career. While Folco’s invective in Paradiso IX unmistakably employs the ‘language of a crusader’,24 Barolini claims Dante also pays tribute to ‘Folquet’ the love poet, through his highly rhetorical selfpresentation and the epithets ‘cara gioia’ [precious jewel] (Par. IX, 37) and ‘cara cosa’ [precious thing] (Par. IX, 68), which she claims evoke his

pp. 117–18; Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 86–9; Suitner, pp. 632–3; Toja, ‘Il canto di Folchetto’, p. 253; Zingarelli, La personalità storica, pp. 64–6. As well as to Folco’s crusade poetry and vida, Suitner (p. 636) links the lines ‘il maladetto fiore / c’ha disviate le pecore e li agni . . . / però che fatto ha lupo del pastore’ in the Paradiso to the line ‘lupi erant heritici, oves cristiani’, found in one of his sermons. 21 Asperti, p. 79. 22 Asperti, p. 77. See also Beltrami, p. 32, who says the figure we encounter in Paradise is not the poet but the Bishop of Toulouse. Viscardi draws a parallel between Folco and Rahab (‘anche Folchetto redime le dissipazioni della sua vita giovanile non solo con la penitenza, ma più con l’opera sua di crociato della fede’ [Folco too atones for his youthful profligacy, not only through repentance but also through his crusade poetry]: p. 955). See also Giunta, La poesia italiana, p. 62. 23 See Asperti, p. 81: ‘Quello di Folco è un discorso interamente politico-morale’ [Folco’s discourse is an entirely moral and political one]. Along similar lines, Beltrami states: ‘ . . . se si tratta di poesia . . . resta alla fine di fronte a Dante il solo Arnaut, i cui versi non suoi nella Commedia sono di fatto l’estremo epilogo della tradizione trobadorica’ [in terms of poetry there remains before Dante only Arnaut, whose words in the Commedia are the final epilogue of the Occitan tradition] (p. 48). On Bertran in the Commedia, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 153–73; Honess, ‘Political Poetry’, pp. 142–9; M. Shapiro, ‘The Fictionalization of Bertran de Born (Inf. XXVIII)’, Dante Studies, 92 (1974), 107–16. 24 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 120.

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‘precious verse and caras rimas’,25 as Dante continues to pay tribute to his poetic identity. The two distinct linguistic registers reflect this opposition between ‘the preciosity of his love poems and . . . the fervor of his crusade songs’.26 Barolini argues that—unlike Giraut and Guittone—the converted Folco was not a poet of rectitude, since he made ‘no concerted effort to direct people in the living of their everyday lives, or to provide an anatomy of morals’.27 Rather, she sees the constituent halves of Folco’s corpus as comprising two sorts of love poetry: one secular, the other divine. Folco is thus seen to embody the sublimation of erotic into divine love, and to establish the model of ‘a poetics of erotic conversion’ to which the Commedia’s assorted love poets can aspire.28 Indeed, the critic sees Folco (‘a love poet presented in the aura of politics’)29 as a kind of compendium of the poem’s three other troubadours: the political poets Bertran de Born and Sordello and the love poet Arnaut. Love and politics are not fused in Folco, however, but instead appear in conflict and he is thus intended ‘to suggest—not embody—the fusion between love poetry and political poetry that alone can make a poet truly great’,30 a fusion that defines Dante’s Commedia. Other critics, notably Michelangelo Picone, emphasize what they see as a close parallel between Dante’s journey from Beatrice to God and Folco’s transition from love poetry to crusade songs. They contend, in other words, that Dante privileges Folco because, as a poet, his journey came 25

Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 117. On ‘cara gioia’, see also Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 77. Zingarelli (La personalità storica, pp. 29–30) links the use of ‘ardere’ in line 97 to Folco’s love poetry, while Viscardi (p. 954) links it, more convincingly, to Virgil’s line ‘ardet amans Dido’ (Aeneid IV, 101). Rossi (‘Ovidian exemplarity’), meanwhile, has explored the intertextual significance of the Ovidian exemplars used in the Paradiso to describe the immoderate nature of Folco’s former erotic fervour—exemplars that he claims have precedents in Folco’s own love poetry. Coletti, by contrast, argues that the first half of Folco’s speech rings with a hollow bombast: ‘un ampio ed elaborato discorso non privo di esteriore solennità, ma poeticamente inerte, tutto affidato com’è al retorico artificio delle perifrasi, delle digressioni, delle erudite citazioni geografiche, astronomiche e poi storiche e mitologiche: artifici e virtuosismi in cui le linee del personaggio e della situazione mi sembran perdere ogni concretezza ed ogni vera individualità’ [a broad and elaborate discourse not without solemnity, but poetically inert, entirely at the mercy of an artificial rhetoric of periphrasis, digressions and erudite geographical, astronomical, historical, and mythological references: these artificial flourishes mean that the profile of the character and the particular episode seem to lose all concreteness and individuality]: Coletti, pp. 38–9. Suitner, similarly, sees the speech as fairly generic, showing parallels between it and the speeches of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas in the Heaven of the Sun (p. 643). 26 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 121. See also Bergin, p. 99; Toja, ‘Il canto di Folchetto’, p. 249. 27 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 122. I shall argue in the next section, however, that we can identify substantial parallels between Folco’s crusade songs and Guittone’s moral verse. 28 29 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 122. Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 187. 30 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 184.

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closest to matching that of Dante himself. Folco is, says Picone, ‘un’imago nella quale Dante si può più compiutamente e adeguatamente rispecchiare’ [the mirror into which Dante can most fully project his own image as a love poet],31 and the poet who ‘ha toccato le cime più alte della sperimentazione del contenuto amoroso’ [reached the highest peaks in the realm of love poetry].32 Asperti, too, emphasizes a certain parallelism between Folco and Dante, considering the troubadour ‘una figura parziale di Dante stesso e di alcuni dei tratti che ne qualificano l’opera’ [a partial figure of Dante himself and some of the features that characterize his work],33 on account of their shared journey from profane love and love poetry to divine service. While Asperti goes on to stress that, unlike Folco, Dante ‘resta letterato e si dichiara poeta’ [remains a man of letters and declares himself a poeta],34 he nevertheless identifies an ideological congruence between the author of the Commedia and the troubadour from Marseilles.35 The difference between Asperti’s and Picone’s perspectives is that while Asperti sees an analogy between Dante and Folco that does not extend to the field of poetry,36 Picone sees Folco the crusade poet, like the author of the Commedia, as a ‘mediatore della parola divina’ [mediator of the divine word].37 The status of Folco and his relationship to Dante therefore raise a number of intriguing and interrelated questions. What does Paradiso IX tell us, if anything, about the status of pre-existing love poetry in the Commedia? What worth does Dante attach to Folco as a love poet? How are we to understand the relationship between Dante’s and Folco’s respective poetic and spiritual journeys, from the courtly lyric to God? These questions not only concern the figure of Folco himself, but also lead us to issues central to Dante’s own poetic identity and the value he ascribes to erotic love and love poetry. Before looking closely at Dante’s poem, however, it is important to consider what we can ascertain regarding Folco’s conversion from earthly love through an analysis of his own poetry. 31 Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 47. See also R. Antonelli, ‘Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores’, in Picone, ed., Guittone d’Arezzo, pp. 337–49 (p. 347–8); Picone, ‘Giraut de Bornelh’, p. 43. Antonelli states that Folco is a ‘figura di Dante poeta-scriba dell’amorecaritas’ [figure of Dante the poet/scribe of divine love] (pp. 347–8). 32 Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 77 (my translation). 33 34 Asperti, p. 80 (my translation). Asperti, p. 80 (my translation). 35 Chiavacci Leonardi similarly argues that in Folco Dante ‘riconosceva non pochi tratti della sua stessa storia terrena’ [recognized a number of aspects of his own biography]: in Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, ed. and with a commentary by A. M. Chiavacci Leonardi (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 258. 36 See also Beltrami (p. 33, n. 8), who contends that only Dante can be seen as a poet of caritas. 37 Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 88.

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5.1 (ANTI-)COURTLY CONVERSIONS: FOLCO, GUITTONE, DANTE Folco’s erotic verse, like Arnaut’s, presents the lover as subjected to a powerful and dominant desire. It is a poetry, as Donna Yowell states, ‘replete with references to excessive love’.38 ‘Tant m’abellis’, the amatory canso with which Dante engaged closely, is paradigmatic, describing the bittersweet torments born out of a powerful and unflinching love. I cite the first three of its five main stanzas: Tant m’abellis l’amoros pessamens que s’es vengutz e mon fin cor assire, per que no·i pot nuills autre pens caber ni mais negus no m’es doutz ni plazens, c’adoncs viu sas quan m’aucio·ill cossire; e fin’amors aleuja mo matire que·m promet joi mas trop lo·m donna len, c’ab bel semblan m’a trainat longamen. Ben sai que tot quant fatz es dreitz niens! Eu qu’en puosc als s’Amors mi vol aucire? qu’a escien m’a donat tal voler que ja non er vencutz ni el no vens; vencutz si er qu’aucir m’an li sospire tot soavet, si de lieis cui desire non ai socors, ni d’aillor no l’aten, ni d’autr’amor non puosc aver talen. Bona dompna, si·us platz, siatz sufrens del ben qu’ie·us voill, qu’ieu sui del mal sufrire, e pois lo mals no·m poira dan tener, anz m’er semblan que·l partam egalmens; e s’a vos platz qu’en autra part me vire, ostatz de vos la beutat e·l gen rire e·l douz parlar que m’afollis mon sen pois partir m’ai de vos, mon escien. (II, 1–24) [So pleasing to me is the thought of love that has taken root in my noble heart that there is no room for any other thought, nor is anything else sweet and pleasant to me, for I live in good health even when the thought kills me, and fin’amor alleviates my torment and promises me joy, but it does so too slowly as with her beautiful appearance it has drawn me for so long. / I know that everything that I do is truly nothing, but what else can I do if Love wishes to 38

Yowell, p. 392.

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kill me? For Love has given me such a love that will not conquer or be conquered! It will finally be vanquished because my sighs will kill me sweetly if I do not receive mercy from her whom I desire. From others I do not expect mercy, and I cannot desire another love. / Noble lady, if it pleases you, suffer the goodness that I desire, because I suffer the ill and so the ill cannot bring me suffering—rather it will seem that we will divide it in two: and if you wish that I go elsewhere, then remove from yourself your beauty and your sweet smile and the beautiful face that maddens my reason: then I promise you I will take my leave of you.]

While the incipit might suggest a soothing or ennobling ‘amoros pessamens’, the love at stake in this canso is tyrannical (‘per que no·i pot nuills autre pens caber’)—a source not of placation but of pain and suffering. It threatens the lover with death (‘s’Amors mi vol aucire’), obliterates his rationality (‘que m’afollis mon sen’), and is seen as inherently excessive and irreducible to language (‘Trop vos am mais, dompna, qu’ieu no sai dire’ [So abundantly do I love you, my lady, that I cannot put it into words]: line 41). It is thus emblematic of the kind of destructive love we will come to associate with Francesca and Inferno V, and indeed the ‘folle amore’ [mad love] (Par. VIII, 1) described by Dante at the start of Paradiso VIII; and it helps to account for the Commedia’s representation of Folco as a once ardent courtly lover who redirected his passion towards God. Folco’s vida tells us how his life pivoted upon the religious conversion that he undertook following the deaths of Barral and Adelais, a conversion ultimately reflected in his poetic conversion from amatory to crusade poetry. Before looking at the crusade poems, which were found in various Italian chansonniers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it should be noted that Folco’s movement away from love poetry was, like Guittone’s, not entirely abrupt. As Albert Rossi writes, the crusade poems ‘seem to have brought to final fruition the process prefigured by Folco’s malas chansos’: love lyrics in which the poet renounces Amors.39 The most significant example of this ‘conversionary impetus’40 in Folco’s preconversion poetry comes in the planh for Barral ‘Si com sel qu’es tan greujatz’ [Like the one who is overwhelmed by grief] (XXI). As noted by Barolini, this transitional poem, penned three years before the poet’s conversion, clearly foreshadows the attitude and tone of his later crusade poems.41 It meditates on earthly transience and posits oppositions between 39 Rossi, ‘Ovidian Exemplarity’, p. 59. In his poem ‘Sitot me soi a tart aperceubuz’, for instance, Folco strikingly exclaims ‘mas eu m’en part e segrai autra via’ [But I depart from you and will follow another path] (VII, 13). 40 Rossi, ‘Ovidian Exemplarity’, p. 59. 41 On the planh as contemptus mundi, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 119–20, for whom it ‘illuminates the spiritual condition required for conversion from human to divine love’ (p. 120).

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worldly and spiritual glory. Secular achievement (‘pretz’) constitutes ‘desonor’ and earthly ‘sens’ is ‘follor’, recalling the common opposition between ‘saver’ and ‘folor’ in the poetry of ‘Fra Guittone’. We might also recall Arnaut’s dismissal of his own poetic/erotic past as his ‘passada folor’, situated in opposition to celestial ‘valor’, in Purgatorio XXVI. All of these cases point to the kind of binary thinking in relation to love that I believe Dante in the Commedia resists. It is with the crusade poems, however, that Folco’s poetic conversion is more fully realized and articulated. As we have seen, the name under which he appears in the Paradiso, Folco, is that associated with his episcopal career and crusade poetry, confirming the decisive role of Folco’s conversion away from love poetry in achieving his salvation. It points to a schism between poetic identities, between the frivolity of his love poetry and the forceful public engagement of his later life and poetry. In the wider context of this study, this opposition cannot help but recall the moral trajectory of the Italian convert par excellence, Guittone, and the two distinct headings—‘Guittone’ and ‘Fra Guittone’—under which his own poems are compiled in the Laurenziano manuscript. That Folco’s and Guittone’s corpora can both be bisected in such a way is surely significant, showing a similarly binary model of conversion to be common to both writers. The similarities between the two poets are in fact far from superficial, and have important implications. The defining characteristic of Guittone’s moral verse was, of course, its unambiguous rejection of worldly desire. He identified an inherent conflict between the earthly and the spiritual that he believed could be resolved only through abstentious means. Accordingly, he starkly rejects his identity as a courtly poet, and rebuts the notion that poetic worth should be rooted solely in a poet’s faithful articulation of erotic experience. This conversion, archetypally documented by ‘Ora parrà’, tends to be regarded as radical and distinctive within the context of the medieval lyric tradition. It shows striking similarities, however, to Folco’s own conversion ‘manifesto’: the crusade song ‘Chantars mi torna ad afan’. This poem was written as a plea to Richard the Lionheart and King Philip Augustus of France to follow the example of Emperor Henry VI, who sent a crusade to the Holy Land in 1195, and offers valuable insights into Folco’s ideology as a converted poet. Let us consider its opening stanza: Chantars mi torna ad afan quan mi soven d’En Barral, e pois d’amor plus no·m cal, no sai com ni de que chan; mas quecs demanda chansso e no·il cal de la razo:

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[Singing for me turns into pain when I recall Sir Barral, and since I no longer care for love, I don’t know how nor of what to sing; but each asks for a song and doesn’t care about the subject: and so it is necessary for me to invent it (the razo), along with the words and the music; and since, constrained, without love, I sing out of debt and from folly, my song will be worthy, whether it is good or not.]

While Guittone’s conversion in ‘Ora parrà’ is born out of the poet’s meditation upon human love upon taking his religious orders, Folco here relates his conversion to the death of Barral. The memory of his departed lord, he tells us, means that his poetry can now describe only pain (afan). And since he is no longer interested in love (‘pois d’amor plus no·m cal’: line 3), the poet no longer knows how nor of what to write (‘no sai com ni de que chan’: line 4), underlining the prevailing association of poetry and love in the vernacular lyric tradition and the poet’s decision to sever himself from it. This clearly recalls ‘Ora parrà’, which, in the equivalent lines and using remarkably similar language, announces Guittone’s own renunciation of love (‘poi che del tutto Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio’ [since I altogether flee from Love and do not want it]: line 3) and conveys a similar concern as to the validity of a love-less poetics (‘Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare / e s’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio’ [Now it will become apparent if I still know how to sing, and was worth what I used to be worth]). Like Guittone, Folco then proceeds to underline the novelty of his new undertaking. His circumstances, he says, require him to reassess the parameters of the lyric, in terms of its content, its lexis, and its sound (‘c’atressi m’es ops la fassa / de nuou, cum los motz e·l so’). Folco’s ‘converted’ praxis, in other words, involves a complete reappraisal of what constitutes poetry, as the poet emphasizes the absolute discontinuity between the old Folco and the new, who is a poet and yet now ‘ses amor’. As in ‘Ora parrà’, however, a concern for the poem’s validity is swiftly replaced by an assured declaration of intent and a calling into question of conventional courtly values. Whether the poem corresponds to what is traditionally considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (‘si non es avols ni bos’), Folco states, no longer concerns him. ‘Ora parrà’ performs the same function in questioning the wisdom of the ‘om tenuto saggio’. Guittone’s evocation of this figure serves to negate the conventional and highly subjective barometer of poetic worth, just as Folco seeks to do so here in his prioritizing of what is ‘empirically’ important: Christian ethics trump secular aesthetics.

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In both cases, the poet turns away not only from love, but also from lyric subjectivity towards universality. These proemial stanzas of ‘Chantars’ and ‘Ora parrà’ thus perform an identical function: first, they announce in very similar terms that the poet is no longer concerned with love; second, they show that this abandonment of love contravenes the ethos of the lyric tradition; finally, they very consciously challenge the courtly maxim that poetry must depend upon the articulation of erotic desire, and promote a new notion of poetic worth. The opening lines of the two poems are also closely related to Dante’s own ‘Le dolci rime’, though Dante of course shows a certain resistance to the conversionary model common to his predecessors in asserting the temporary nature of his own departure from love. For Folco and Guittone, unlike for Dante, the very essence of conversion, and the basis of redemption, lies in an unequivocal and permanent fracture between the poet and love: moral poetry is necessarily non-erotic poetry. This is made explicit in Folco’s second stanza, where the ideological affinities between Folco and Guittone are even more pronounced: Amador son d’un semblan e·l ric cobe d’atretal, c’ades ab dolor coral mermon lor joi on mais n’an: qu’en luoc de fenestra so que merma s’om i apo; on plus pren quecs so que cassa plus a del segre ochaiso; per qu’ieu teng cel per meillo que rei ni emperador qui celz mals aips vens amdos que vensso·l plus dels baros. (XIV, 13–24) [Lovers are all of the same ilk, just like the greedy rich, for always with heartfelt pain their joys decrease when they have more of them, for they (joys) are like a window whose aperture decreases if one adds adornments to it; for the more each obtains what he pursues the more motive he has for pursuing; for which reason I hold that one better than a king or emperor who overcomes both these ills that overcome most of the barons.]

While ‘Chantars’ ultimately targets the barons who neglect to join the crusades (anticipating in this sense the emphasis of Folco’s speech in the Commedia), this stanza condemns vice in a broader sense. We saw in Chapter 3 how ‘Ora parrà’, having described Guittone’s rejection of love and his non-adherence to the courtly ethos in its opening stanza, moves away from autobiography to address broader questions of vice and virtue. Folco here does likewise: having sought to validate his new approach in the

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self-reflexive and metapoetic opening stanza, his focus quickly shifts to those he seeks to condemn. Not only does Folco here move from the personal to the universal, and from the first person to the third, in a manner reminiscent of Guittone, but the categories of sinner described— the lustful and the avaricious—are the very same ones (‘Amador son d’un semblan / e·l ric cobe d’atreal’).42 This categorical dismissal of human love as nothing more than a branch of cupidity is, of course, the very essence of Guittone’s anti-courtly ideology. For both poets, the lustful and the avaricious are congenitally linked through their foolish, interminable desires. This is also significant with respect to Dante. Barolini has argued that Guittone’s ‘[refusal] to segregate courtly love’ in ‘Ora parrà’ acts as a vital precedent to ‘Doglia mi reca’.43 Yet here in Folco’s poem we find an important and apparently unacknowledged precedent to both Italian canzoni. For Folco as for Guittone, all worldly desires, whether courtly love or avarice, preclude the hope of true satisfaction (‘on plus pren quecs so que cassa / plus a del segre ochaiso’: lines 19–20), which is attained only through the salvation that follows divine service. Guittone’s principal admonition of the avaricious in ‘Ora parrà’ comes in his fourth stanza, which attacks the ‘omo fellon’ (line 47) who subjugates his intellect to his rapacious desire for wealth. Such a man dedicates himself to an irrational pursuit that can lead only to a vicious circle of self-defeat (‘credendo venir ricco, ven mendico’ [who believing himself to become rich, becomes poor]: line 48). Again, as for Folco, the illusion of obtaining wealth masks spiritual impoverishment; lacking a redemptive object, worldly desire cannot lead to plenitude, but only generates further desire. ‘Oimais no·i conosc razo’ (XVIII), Folco’s other crusade poem, is a call to arms for the Christian world following the defeat of Alfonso VIII of Spain at the hands of the Moroccan Abû-Jûsuf in 1195. It focuses much less upon the poet’s own conversion and moral ideology, and is, for my purposes here, a less pertinent poem than ‘Chantars’. Yet it shares the earlier poem’s critique of worldly desire and emphasis upon the folly of privileging the mortal cors over the immortal arma. While Bertran’s war poetry is censured by Dante in the Inferno for its bloodthirsty and schismatic tendencies, we find here no explicitly bellicose imagery, but instead an unwavering focus upon the eternal fate of the Christian soul and a denigration of the mortal flesh. This is war poetry, says Rossi, that

42 ‘Folquet does not . . . characterize this comportment as an offense against, or a perversion of, a better kind of love; rather, lovers are explicitly dismissed here without qualification’: Rossi, ‘Ovidian Exemplarity’, p. 74. 43 Barolini, ‘Anatomy of Desire’, p. 49.

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‘discernibly preaches God’s service’.44 Dying for the cause, Folco contends, acts as a means of repaying God’s ultimate sacrifice (‘De si mezeis nos fetz do / quan venc nostre tortz delir’ [He sacrificed himself when he came to take away our sins]: XVIII, 12–13) and ensures eternal life: doncs qui vol viven morir er don per Dieu sai vida e la presen, qu’el la donet e la rendet moren, c’atressi deu hom morir non sap co. (XVIII, 16–19) [So, whoever wishes to die and achieve eternal life, give his life to God, for He provided it and fulfils it through death, for one must die even if one does not know how.]

Throughout the canzone, crusade is presented purely as a path to salvation. The body’s fate is beyond our control, for all the worldly riches we may possess, yet the destiny of the soul is at the mercy of our free will: que·l cors, c’om non pot gandir de mort per aver que·i do, vol quecs gardar e blandir, e de l’arma non a nuill espaven que pot gardar de mort e de tormen;

(XVIII, 25–9)

[For the body, which one cannot defend from death however many riches one possesses, everybody wishes to protect and preserve, yet nobody fears the fate of the soul, which, by contrast, can save us from death and torment.]

This passage would doubtless have resonated with Dante’s own endorsement of the crusades, not least in its associated critique of avarice. His ancestor Cacciaguida offers a very similar rhetoric of martyrdom in the Paradiso, contrasting the deceitful loves of this ‘mondo fallace’ with the peace found in Paradise: ‘Quivi fu’ io da quella gente turpa disviluppato dal mondo fallace, lo cui amor molte’anime deturpa; e venni dal martiro a questa pace.’ (Par. XV, 145–8) [There I was freed by that foul race from all snares of the deceitful world—the love of which corrupts so many souls—and came from being martyred to this place.]

Folco’s rather neglected crusade songs thus offer illuminating insights into the nature of his conversion and the relationship between the constituent parts of his corpus. They perform a stark and emphatic transition from 44

Rossi, ‘Ovidian Exemplarity’, p. 76.

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the lyric/erotic sphere to the public/political. What seems particularly important is the manner in which he brackets the rich with human lovers of every sort, and thus draws a stark line between his erotic and his moral production in a manner highly reminiscent of Guittone. Folco’s spiritual growth is dependent upon establishing an emphatic and impermeable opposition between the worldly and the spiritual, reflected in an emphatic dissociation from the lyric mode and its thematic norms. We should remain mindful, however, of discrepancies between Folco’s and Guittone’s respective conversions—discrepancies that are perhaps significant with respect to Dante’s diverging attitudes towards the two poets. Where Folco’s life story and poetry exude a passionate commitment, first to Adelais and later to God, Guittone’s proposed path to spiritual betterment is less one of spiritual fervour than what we saw Barolini describe as a ‘bourgeois ethic . . . of measured toil and measured gain’. While Folco dedicated his postconversion poetry to a cause (the crusades) that Dante evidently admired, Guittone’s rejection of love poetry coincided with his joining of the ‘Frati Gaudenti’, a monastic order that Dante disdained on account of its perceived hypocrisy and corruption. Claire Honess attributes Dante’s disdain towards Guittone, in part, to their contrasting attitudes as exiled political poets: while Dante’s experience of exile is one ‘of a fundamental emotional deprivation’ and the spirit of his political poetry is ‘always a reformative one’,45 Guittone’s exile from Ghibelline Arezzo, as documented by the canzone ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ [Tedious and wretched people] (XV), was self-imposed, and the poet appears ‘happy to write off [the city] and leave it to its fate’.46 This attitude also contrasts with the ardent engagement and desire for political and ecclesiastical reform we witness in Folco’s crusade poetry. This distinction between Guittone’s detachment and Folco’s commitment can also be identified in Dante’s evaluation of the two poets’ amatory pasts: while Paradiso IX describes how Folco once ‘burned’ with erotic fervour (‘più non arse la figlia di Belo’ [the daughter of Belus (Dido) was no more aflame]: 97), Guittone is dismissed in Purgatorio XXIV as lacking a true identification with Amor. While Folco is therefore consistently synonymous with passion, in both courtly and ecclesiastical contexts, Guittone might appear, from a Dantean perspective, more detached and opportunistic—as poet and ‘convert’ alike.

45 Honess, ‘Political Poetry’, p. 131. She continues: ‘Ultimately . . . Guittone cannot function as a political poet, since he is not a political animal; for him the only possible answer to the problems and corruption of earthly society is that of withdrawing from society altogether . . . . The conceptions Dante and Guittone have of the political role of the poet are thus fundamentally different’ (pp. 134–5). 46 Honess, ‘Political Poetry’, p. 131.

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I discussed at the beginning of the chapter Picone’s argument that, just as Beatrice’s death in the Vita nova prompts Dante’s love poetry to move from a fixation on ‘valori terreni (“saluto” e “lode”) al valore eterno (“gloria”)’ [from worldly values (Beatrice’s greeting and Dante’s praise poetry) to eternal glory], so Folco’s concern shifts from venus to virtus. Picone notes that the same parallel was drawn by Benvenuto da Imola in his commentary on Paradiso IX: ‘Mortua uxore Baralis amarissimum dolorem concepit olim Dantes de morte suae Beatricis’ [following the death of the wife of Baralm Folco was filled with a bitter pain like that of Dante following the death of Beatrice].47 The analogy is to some extent valid. The lesson of Adelais’s death, for Folco, is that it exposes earthly love as something that concerns only the body, and that can have no positive bearing on the eternal fate of the soul. The death of Beatrice, too, prompts Dante to look beyond carnal gratification; he, too, directs his passion towards political and ecclesiastical reform. Yet I believe this ideological parallel between the two poets is ultimately misleading. As we have seen here, Folco’s path, as documented by both his crusade poems and his vida, in fact links him far more to Guittone than it does to Dante, and thus to the dualistic model of conversion that Dante so pointedly rejects. Dante never performs a stark U-turn as Folco does, never declares himself ‘ses amor’ [without love], but follows a more complex and audacious path, establishing a fluidity between loves and a convergence of lyric and spiritual identities. Even in death, Beatrice remains the fulcrum of Dante’s poetry. The severing of vernacular poetry from love, witnessed in both Guittone and Folco, clearly contrasts with Dante’s self-definition in Purgatorio XXIV, where he avows his own ongoing fidelity to love as his source of authority and inspiration. What we must now consider, however, is the extent to which the dualistic model of conversion identified in my reading of Folco here is actually reflected in the Commedia’s portrayal of him. Does Dante, in other words, interpret Folco’s transition from love poetry to crusade poetry in the ‘Guittonian’ key that the crusade poetry suggests? Or does he seem to identify in Folco a more fluid transition from erotic to divine love, which prefigures his own in the Commedia? 5.2 CONTINUITY AND CONVERSION IN THE HEAVEN OF VENUS How we interpret the character of Folco in the Commedia to a great extent depends upon our broader understanding of the heaven in which he 47

Cited in Picone, ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 73.

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resides. Venus was, of course, the Roman goddess of sensual love, and played a prominent role in classical literature. This erotic association survived in the Christian Middle Ages, and it is therefore unsurprising that characters from the world of love literature come to the fore in this heaven. Both Cunizza and Folco are closely linked to the world of courtly love:48 Cunizza was famous for her love affair with the poet Sordello, while Folco was not only a love poet, but one particularly noted for his erotic fervour.49 Love is not, however, the only matter at stake in Venus. While Venus was understood by the ancients purely in terms of her erotic influence, the medieval planet of Venus was believed to possess a double aspect, as both a morning and an evening star, and a corresponding twofold influence: one benign and political; the other, destructive and erotic.50 This duality is reflected in the thematics of cantos VIII and IX: Dante uses canto VIII, where we encounter Charles Martel, to consider questions of civic order, while in canto IX he presents us with three converted characters celebrated (or perhaps notorious) for their former association with erotic love. The Heaven of Venus might thus be seen as the most morally complex of the Paradiso’s nine spheres. Given the condemnation of sexual passion we find in the Inferno, it is certainly striking to find here souls famed for their promiscuity.51 Some critics in fact consider these souls’ sexual ardour to be ‘continuous’ with their later charity, implying that the lustful have a greater capacity for caritas than others.52 It is surely surprising, as Joan Ferrante notes, that Cunizza and Rahab are found in a ‘higher’ sphere than Piccarda and Costanza, who, despite their own determination to remain virgins, were forcibly removed from the cloister.53 It is also intriguing that Dante diverges from Aquinas in making lust the least culpable of the Commedia’s sins, placing it in a liminal position in each canticle: the first circle of Hell after Limbo, the last terrace of Purgatory, 48 Asperti states that ‘un personaggio del mondo cortese come Cunizza ribadisce la corrispondenza tra amore, cultura cortese e letteratura romanza’ [a figure from the world of courtly love like Cunizza reaffirms the connection between love, courtly culture, and Romance literature] (p. 74). 49 Suitner (p. 627) notes that Raimon Vidal describes the poet as ‘en Folquet l’amoros’ [the amorous Folquet]. 50 This is alluded to by Dante in his description of Venus as ‘la stella / che ’l sol vagheggia or da coppa or da ciglio’ [the star wooed by the sun, now at her nape, now at her brow] (Par VIII, 12). See E. Peters, ‘Human Diversity and Civil Society in Paradiso VIII’, DS, 109 (1991), 51–70 (pp. 56–7). 51 Medieval commentators went as far as branding Cunizza a whore (‘meretrix’): see Hollander, in Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, ed. and with a commentary by R. Hollander and trans. by R. Hollander and J. Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 217. 52 See Williams, pp. 35–59. 53 Ferrante, Woman as Image, p. 151.

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and the last heaven in the earth’s shadow in Paradise.54 Taken collectively, there is certainly a sense of lust placed on the very cusp of redemption. Yet for all that Dante approaches questions of lust and desire in a nuanced and often thought-provoking manner, we must not overstate the value that Venus ascribes to eros. After all, it is on account of their former propensity to human love that the souls here, like those in the Paradiso’s first two heavens (the Moon and Mercury), dwell in the earth’s shadow. In the Heaven of the Moon, Piccarda insists that the presence of this shadow does not detract from the beatitude enjoyed by these souls (‘Se disïamo esser più superne, / foran discordi li nostri disiri / dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne’ [If we desired to be more exalted, our desires would be discordant with His will, which assigns us to this place: Par. III, 73–5]). Yet while Dante’s third realm, a place where ‘ogne dove / . . . è paradiso’ [everywhere is paradise] (Par. III, 88–9), is notionally characterized by equality and plenitude, some of its denizens are evidently more equal than others,55 and the shadow covering the first three heavens does inevitably seem to compromise some souls’ status among the blessed.56 Pertile, meanwhile, has used this heaven to substantiate his view that human love has no place in the Paradiso, noting that the only lovers present in Venus are ‘amanti pentiti’ [repented lovers], who speak not of love, but of politics.57 Indeed, he notes that while the word Amore appears in all but four of the Paradiso’s thirty-three cantos, one of these four is Paradiso IX.58 How, then, are we to interpret this heaven and its treatment of human love? What role, if any, did human love play in these souls’ salvation? The opening lines of canto VIII give a sense of Dante-poeta’s primary polemic in this heaven with regard to love: Solea creder lo mondo in suo periclo che la bella Ciprigna il folle amore ragiasse, volta nel terzo epiciclo; per che non pur a lei faceano onore 54

See Allegretti, ‘Canto IX’, p. 136. Ordiway states that ‘it would be a mistake . . . to ignore the fact that Dante has chosen to speak of human deficiencies among the souls in Paradise’: F. B. Ordiway, ‘In the Earth’s Shadow: The Theological Virtues Marred’, DS, 100 (1982), 77–92 (p. 78). He claims that the deviations we find in the first three heavens are imperfect forms of the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity), following the correction of the moral virtues in Purgatory. See also Barolini, Undivine Comedy, pp. 176–93. 56 Peters (p. 54) describes the first three heavens as a kind of ‘Ante-Paradise’, and notes the conspicuous change of ‘feel’ once we reach the Heaven of the Sun in canto X. It is probably significant that both the city of Dis and Purgatory ‘proper’ also begin in canto X of their respective cantiche. 57 See Pertile, ‘Dimenticare Beatrice’, p. 236. 58 See Pertile, ‘Dimenticare Beatrice’, p. 235. 55

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Dante’s Lyric Redemption di sacrificio e di votivo grido le genti antiche ne l’antico errore; ma Dïone onoravano e Cupido, quella per madre sua, questo per figlio, e dicean ch’el sedette in grembo a Dido; e da costei ond’io principio piglio pigliavano il vocabol de la stella che ’l sol vagheggia or da coppa or da ciglio.

(Par. VIII, 1–12)

[To its own cost, there was a time the world believed that the fair Cyprian beamed rays of maddened love, revolving in the wheel of the third epicycle, so that the ancient peoples in their ancient error not only did her honour, with sacrifice and votive cry, but honoured Dione and Cupid too, one as her mother, the other as her son, and told how once he sat in Dido’s lap. And from her with whom I here begin they took the name of the star that is wooed by the sun, now at her nape, now at her brow.]

Dante seeks to refute the amorous fatalism of the ‘genti antiche’, who held that the destructive influence of Venus was inescapable.59 In line 9, Dante evokes Dido, the classical exemplar of lust par excellence in the Middle Ages and a figure who embodies an inexorable and destructive form of desire.60 The ‘antico errore’ here appears closely linked to the ‘error de’ ciechi che si fanno duci’ [the blind who set themselves as guides] (Purg. XVIII, 18) described by Virgil in the Purgatorio—the error of those who refuse to accept that wanton desire can, in fact, be curbed. As well as the determinism of the classical world, we must assume that Dante challenges the fatalism of the medieval love lyric, and in particular the philosophy of Guido Cavalcanti, who is strongly implicated intertextually in Inferno V.61 This nexus between the fatalist ‘antichi’ and the love poetry of the Middle Ages is established in canto IX, as Folco associates his former, courtly self with three classical exempla of lust: Phyllis, Hercules, and (once again) Dido:62

59 Kenelm Foster argues that Dante’s allusions to the angelic orders in these cantos see him correct the classical error of placing Venus—‘a mere human fantasy’—in the place of God’s angels. See Foster, ‘Dante and Eros’, in The Two Dantes, pp. 37–55 (pp. 48–9). As Barolini states, what is at stake is the difference between a superficial and a profound understanding of human love—‘between a “vocabol” and a “principio” ’, as Dante says here: Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 61. Asperti (p. 75) notes classical precedents for the term ‘folle amore’. 60 See especially M. Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 61 See Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’. 62 Rossi argues that these exemplars reflect a strong Ovidian vein in Folco’s love poetry, while Asperti (p. 77) denies that there is any significant link between them and Folco’s own poetic past.

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‘ché più non arse la figlia di Belo, noiando e a Sicheo e a Creusa, di me, infin che si convenne al pelo; né quella Rodopëa che delusa fu da Demofoonte, né Alcide quando Iole nel core ebbe rinchiusa.’ (Par. IX, 97–102) [For the daughter of Belus was no more aflame, bringing grief to Sychaeus and to Creusa, than I, until the colour of my hair began to fade; nor was she of Rhodope, who was deceived by Demophoon, nor Alcides, when he embraced Iole in his heart.]

This relationship between courtly and classical amatory fatalism also informs Inferno V, where the catalogue of ‘donne antiche e ’ cavalieri’ [ladies and knights of old] (71) segues from ancient exemplars, such as Dido, Achilles, and Cleopatra, to the Romance figure of Tristan, as well as the discourse of medieval love poetry all but embodied by Francesca herself and the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere she implicates in her damnation. As we know, lust is certainly not a sin that Dante himself can condemn from a safe distance. The pilgrim’s actions in both Inferno V and Purgatorio XXVII point to his own struggle with ‘folle amore’,63 which must be interpreted in terms of his own rather tumultuous career as a love poet, and he appears to implicate his own ‘rime petrose’ in the faulty conception of love he describes at the start of canto VIII. The rhyme grido/ Dido is also found both at the heart of Dante’s ‘canzone petrosa’ ‘Così nel mio parlar’, as well as in Inferno V,64 while Rossi notes that the same rhyme is redeployed in Purgatorio XI, with ‘Dido’ tellingly replaced by ‘Guido’ in an apparent critique of the amatory of philosophy of Cavalcanti.65 The fatalism associated with these classical and courtly antecedents, and perhaps with Dante’s earlier lyric self, is rejected in Venus. The pilgrim receives

63 Peters (p. 55) goes as far as to suggest that Dante might see Venus as ‘his own’ heaven, noting that the pilgrim immediately notices ‘Lo bel pianeto che d’amar conforta’ [The fair planet that emboldens love] (Purg. I, 19) when he emerges at the foot of Mount Purgatory. 64 In ‘Così nel mio parlar’, Dante writes: ‘E m’ha percosso in terra, e stammi sopra / con quella spada ond’elli ancise Dido, / Amore a cui io grido / merzé chiamando’ [Love has struck me to the ground and stands over me with the sword with which he slew Dido] (Rime 46, 35–8). And in Inferno V: ‘cotali uscir de la schiera ov’è Dido, / a noi venendo per l’aere maligno, / sì forte fu l’affetüoso grido’ [so did these leave the troop where Dido is, coming to us through the malignant air, such force had my affectionate call] (lines 85–7, emphasis added). 65 ‘Dante spins out, at the level of technique, what appears to be an ongoing criticism implicating Guido in his own verses to the Donna petrosa. Cavalcanti’s erroneous view of love as Martian occultation . . . may thus be indirectly remembered as similar to the pernicious view of Venus’s influence rejected at Par. VIII, 1–9’: Rossi, ‘Ovidian Exemplarity’, pp. 85–6 (n. 35).

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hard evidence of our innate capacity to conquer the influence of Venus in the form of three souls—Cunizza, Folco, and Rahab—who overcame their propensity to a destructive eros to become ardent servants of God. Thus, the heaven in this sense ‘responds’ to Inferno V: we learn once and for all that it was not incontrovertible fate, but a lack of moral backbone, that led to Paolo and Francesca’s sin and ensuing demise. Its characters embody Virgil’s discourse in Purgatorio XVII–XVIII and specifically his insistence on the unwavering influence of reason and free will in the ambit of desire: ‘Onde, poniam che di necessitate / surga ogne amor che dentro a voi s’accende, / di ritenerlo è in voi la podestate’ [Let us posit as a given: every love that’s kindled in you arises necessarily. Still, the power to restrain it lies within you] (Purg. XVIII, 70–2). What we must ascertain, however, is how Dante saw the souls in Venus as overcoming the potentially destructive influence of love. Did they follow a proto-Dantean model, somehow ‘redeeming’ their erotic desire? Or did they draw the sort of stark line between erotic and divine love that we find in the postconversion writings of Guittone and Folco the poet? This issue has been discussed by Pamela Williams, who seeks to use the Heaven of Venus as a means of shedding light upon the nature of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Commedia. While the souls in Venus show that ‘folle amore’ had to be mastered in order to attain salvation, Williams argues that they nonetheless link their propensity to eros to the fervent godliness of their latter years, and present sexual desire as ‘somehow dispositive towards divine love’.66 She claims that Cunizza and Folco in the Paradiso are ‘positive about the goodness of their sexuality’,67 referring in particular to Cunizza’s words early in canto IX: ‘Cunizza fui chiamata, e qui refulgo perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella; ma lietamente a me medesma indulgo la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia; che parria forse forte al vostro vulgo.’ (Par. IX, 32–6) [Cunizza was my name, and overcome by this star’s splendour, I shine here. I gladly pardon in myself the reason for my lot, nor does it grieve me—a fact that may seem strange, perhaps, to those unschooled among you.]

While acknowledging that Cunizza has of course repented for her sins, Williams argues that her serenity here points to the constructive role that eros played in her salvation, and that the ‘forte’ of line 36 refers to the perplexing continuity between eros and caritas that our ‘common crowd’ 66

Williams, p. 46.

67

Williams, p. 41.

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cannot comprehend. Folco, the critic suggests, is similarly serene in contemplating his lustful past: ‘Non però qui si pente, ma si ride, non de la colpa, ch’a mente non torna, ma del valor ch’ordinò e provide.’ (Par. IX, 103–5) [Yet here we don’t repent, but smile instead, not at our fault, that comes not back to mind, but for the Power that ordered and foresaw.]

Williams claims that Folco here is ‘positively jubilant’ in the loving influence of Venus upon his life, while Patrick Boyde, similarly, claims that Folco ‘makes a bold and universal statement about the goodness of the sexual appetite in human beings’.68 Cunizza and Folco’s serenity is certainly striking. I would argue, however, that it is more profitably understood in accordance with an earlier reading of the canto by Rachel Jacoff.69 According to Jacoff, what Cunizza believes the pilgrim will find ‘forte’ is not that erotic love and divine love here are linked, but that—having been immersed in the Lethe—she feels no regret towards her past actions: what Jacoff terms a ‘post-palinodic’ tranquility. Her serene acquiescence is ‘forte’ because fallen humanity cannot easily conceive of a mindset where one might identify one’s misdoings but feel no unease in contemplating them.70 Folco, in particular, makes it clear that his salvation was attained not because of a disposition to erotic love, but in spite of it. While he is serene, the caesura ‘la colpa, ch’a mente non torna’ [the fault, which comes not back to mind] clearly emphasizes the opposition between Folco’s former commitment to erotic love and his current beatitude. His refusal to repent for his former lust in Heaven does not mean that it is now celebrated; rather, he may now accept it with a ‘post-palinodic’ serenity. Cunizza and Folco share a model of conversion from erotic to divine love: an idea reinforced by the close structural parallels between their respective speeches.71 For both characters, erotic love is associated with a 68

P. Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 287. 69 See Jacoff, ‘Post-Palinodic’. Jacoff argues that the converted Cunizza and Folco manifest a fundamental trait of the blessed: that they may behold their delinquent pasts with serenity, free from remorse. Barolini offers an intermediary position, claiming that what is ‘forte’ is the fact that in paradise Cunizza may celebrate the fullness of her unique identity: ‘In her present and perpetual indulgence of her former self-indulgence she finds the confirmation of her unique identity, the essence of what makes her Cunizza and no one else; she finds the “cagion di mia sorte” ’: Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 193. 70 As Hollander puts it, ‘The “common herd” will not understand that she is not wracked by penitential thoughts of her sin’: Hollander, Paradiso, p. 218. 71 See M. Balfour, ‘Canto IX’, in Wlassics, ed., Lectura Dantis, III, 131–45 (p. 33).

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sinful past and surely possesses a negative value. Their model of conversion, in my view, displays continuity only insofar as passion is common to both halves of their lives.72 Their stories do not represent eros as a salvific force, but perhaps indicate that those of passion and conviction are those with the greatest capacity to carry out great deeds, provided the pitfalls of worldly desire—of which the most easily succumbed to is lust— are overcome. In their fervent convictions, whether as sinners or as near saints, they represent a counterpoint to the ‘sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi’ [wretches who were never alive] of Inferno III, 64. Williams’s reading of Venus, which places an emphasis on continuity, is opposed to Lino Pertile’s, which starkly separates earthly and divine love in the souls we encounter in canto IX. The critics are allied, however, in associating their reading of Venus with their interpretation of Dante’s love for Beatrice, thereby drawing an implicit ideological parallel between Dante and Folco. Williams links what she sees as the continuity between erotic and divine love in Venus to Dante’s love for Beatrice. For Dante, she says, there is ‘no problem in seeing divine rapture at the end of a process as continuous with the lust that started it out’.73 This is certainly so, but does this correspond to what we find in Venus? It is one thing to say that a former inclination to lust is depicted there as ‘somehow dispositive towards divine love’, but another to suggest that the souls in Venus present their sexual urges as compatible or continuous with their later spiritual rectitude.74 Meanwhile, although in Chapter 2 I questioned Pertile’s assertion that we should ultimately see Dante’s erotic love for Beatrice and his love for God as adversarial, I agree with him that we should identify a schism at the heart of the lives of Cunizza, Rahab, and Folco between human and divine love—a schism, however, that I regard as a counterpoint to Dante’s own integrative handling of love in the Commedia. This view can be substantiated by considering Paradiso IX in tandem with the treatment of lust in the first two cantiche. For while critics have traditionally segregated Folco from the Commedia’s reflection upon love poetry, I believe Paradiso IX is in fact linked to Inferno V and Purgatorio XXVI through a series of interconnections through the three cantiche that help to delineate the ideological parameters of the conventional love lyric and underline its failure to integrate eros and spirituality.

72 Ordiway (pp. 85–6), following Aquinas, discusses the relationship between lust and charity in terms of the two forms of love to which one can aspire: first, with the intellect; second, with the senses. 73 Williams, p. 40. 74 Williams writes: ‘With the souls in Paradiso IX the focus is on continuity, on the relationship between love as a sexual attraction, as passion, and charity’ (p. 46).

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There is good reason to consider Arnaut and Folco in conjunction: not only did they belong to the same poetic tradition, but the opening line of Arnaut’s speech in Purgatorio XXVI (‘Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman’ [Your courteous question so pleases me]: Purg. XXVI, 140) clearly recalls the incipit of Folco’s canso ‘Tant m’abellis’ and invites a comparative consideration. Arnaut appears in Purgatory in the midst of the conversionary movement that led to Folco’s salvation, with lyric identity and lyric desire being transformed and surpassed. We saw in Chapter 4 how Arnaut’s courtly language was transposed into a new semantics of spiritual desire: the quintessential courtly term ‘joi’, for example, no longer denotes the elusive fulfilment of sexual desire, but the true plenitude that awaits in Heaven. Furthermore, Arnaut shows no interest in the debate concerning love poetry that takes place between Dante and Guinizzelli. Rather, his contrite penitence stands in contrast with Dante and Guinizzelli’s worldly dialogue. While Arnaut points forward to Folco in his quotation of ‘Tant m’abellis’, Folco in Paradiso IX (103–5, cited above) seems to contrast his own condition with that of Arnaut below. The penitence (‘Non qui si pente’) and ‘colpa’ to which Folco refers recall a similar contrast drawn by Arnaut himself between purgatorial penance and celestial joy (‘consiros vei la passada folor, / e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, denan’ [I see with grief the past folly, and I see, rejoicing, the joy I hope is coming]: Purg. XXVI, 143–4). While Folco now gives no thought to his sins, Arnaut in Purgatory must remain fixed upon his ‘folor’—a troubadouresque term semantically linked to the ‘folle amore’ of Venus—while the joy of Heaven must remain, for now, ‘denan’. Meanwhile, the ‘valor’ that the souls in Venus contemplate in the above terzina recalls the very ‘valor’ that Arnaut describes in the previous canticle (‘Ara vos prec, per aquella valor / que vos guida al som de l’escalina’ [Now I pray you, by that power that guides you to the summit of the stairs]: Purg. XXVI, 145–6). These links point to the essential convergence of Arnaut and Folco’s moral trajectories, and to the fact that both poets achieve salvation through their rejection of erotic love and love poetry—one while alive, the other in the afterlife. For as long as he remained a lyric poet, confined by that tradition’s signature dualism, Folco could only aspire to the condition of the repentant Arnaut; it was only by radically changing his course—as Arnaut must now do in Purgatory—that salvation was attained. Folco’s incipit, voiced by Arnaut, should thus be seen as indicative of the moral status of Folco’s own love poetry and the limitations of its ideology. It resides with Arnaut on the seventh terrace, since such poems have no place beyond the Lethe, no place in the mind of the converted Folco. ‘Tant m’abellis’ is Folco’s ‘colpa’, his ‘passada folor’, the last ember of his courtly identity burning in the purgatorial flames.

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If Folco embodies Arnaut’s celestial destination, then the unrepentant courtly fundamentalist Francesca crystallizes the pernicious conception of love that both troubadours leave behind. Inferno V, too, is textually and thematically linked to Purgatorio XXVI and Paradiso IX. The words used by Folco to describe his desire to behold God’s glory (‘Qui si rimira ne l’arte ch’addorna / cotanto affetto’ [Here we contemplate the craft that beautifies such love] Par. IX, 106–7) recalls Francesca’s speech in Inferno V: ‘Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange e dice’. (Inf. V, 24–6) [But if you feel such longing to know the first root of our love, I shall tell as one who weeps in telling.]

The phrase ‘cotanto affetto’ only appears on these two occasions. Meanwhile, the words that conclude this terzina (‘come colui che piange e dice’) are echoed—or rather translated—by Arnaut in the Purgatorio: ‘Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan’ [I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way] (Purg. XXVI, 142). An archetypal lyric posture in the case of Francesca is transformed into a penitent one in the case of Arnaut—her self-pitying tears are ‘corrected’ by his contrite weeping, just as Dante’s misplaced desire (‘affetto’) to hear Francesca’s story is recast as the cosmological affect that moves the heavens and the others’ stars. Let us not forget, either, that Guinizzelli’s ‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’ is quoted by Francesca in Inferno V. Francesca’s citation of Guinizzelli, like Arnaut’s citation of Folco, seemingly points to the poet’s ideological failings, his incapacity to achieve the synthesis of sensual and spiritual desire that his famous canzone attempted.75 Francesca quotes Guinizzelli, then, just as Arnaut quotes Folco, while several more subtle textual fragments also link this series of characters from the world of the love lyric. I would suggest Dante carefully links these characters in this manner in order to emphasize that they pertain to the same ideological paradigm. All four show, whether in bono or in malo, how love poetry has conventionally been fettered by its dualism, by its incapacity to reconcile love of the donna and love of God. The Commedia fundamentally aspires to transcend this paradigm, to take love poetry beyond the flames and beyond the earth’s shadow, as shown emblematically in Purgatorio XXVII, where Beatrice’s names inspires Dante to 75 As Suitner points out, however, the poet’s decision not to place any poet in the Inferno’s circle of the lustful shows ‘il rifiuto da parte di Dante anche maturo di condannare senza appello l’esperienza della poesia cortese, il canto d’amore’ [Dante’s refusal, even in later years, to condemn unequivocally the experience of courtly love poetry] (p. 626).

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traverse the ‘foco che afina’ [refining fire], as well as in the very presence of Beatrice as the generative force of Dante’s poetry throughout the final cantica sublimis. What we find in Venus, then, is both an explicit tribute to Folco’s successful conversion and an implicit critique of his shortcomings as a love poet. The lyric path followed by Arnaut and Folco can lead only to dualistic conversion: a somewhat imperfect solution to the conflict posited by the courtly lyric, still predicated upon worldly binaries. As well as the ‘dichotomous’ poetic and spiritual itinerary of Folco, we might consider the ‘doble joi’ sought by Arnaut. Their poetry, in other words, did not achieve Dantean integration, did not derive from an incarnational truth through which such binaries could be transcended. The heaven of Venus and the Circle of the Lustful are, in short, the only destinations to which Arnaut, Guinizzelli, and Folco—all adherents to the same lyric paradigm—could aspire.76 For all three writers, love poetry and salvation, like earthly and divine love, were incompatible. The absence of discussion of poetry and of any exemplary human love in Paradiso IX is thus a meaningful absence, one that attests to the failure of previous vernacular poets, such as Folco, to reformulate lyric desire into a spiritually tenable form. I would thus argue that Dante’s understanding of Folco’s conversion corresponds to that which we witnessed in the troubadour’s own post-conversion poetry. Just as it is fitting that Folco robustly denounces avarice in the Paradiso, so it is fitting that he draws a clear and impermeable line between ‘folle amore’ and salvation. Folco’s conversion does not associate him with Dante. Rather, the former troubadour—for whom ‘Amador son d’un semblan’ [lovers are all alike]—subscribes to the same dualistic model as Arnaut and Guittone. Tellingly, we have seen all three poets posit the same opposition between ‘fol(l)or’ (always alluding to courtly love) and ‘valor’, whether in their own poetry (Guittone and Folco) or in the Commedia itself (Arnaut in Purgatorio XXVI). By contrast, love for the donna for Dante remains valorized, and integration replaces substitution. As we see from comparing the poem’s most famous couplings—Paolo and Francesca/Dante and Beatrice—lovers in the Commedia are far from ‘d’un semblan’. Like other critics, then, I believe Folco’s rejection of erotic love and love poetry—as described in the crusade poems—accounts for his salvation.77 76 Viscardi writes of the ‘pentimento e conversione che han preservato Folchetto dal precipizio del cerchio infernale e lo hanno innalzato tra gli spiriti del cielo di Venere’ [repentance and conversion that kept Folco from the infernal circle and raised him to his place among the souls of Venus] (p. 955). 77 I remain unconvinced by those claims that the rhetoric of Folco in the Paradiso somehow pays tribute to his love poetry. There is an undoubted ‘linguistic eroticism’ in Dante’s initial exchange with him (Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 116), but the highly rhetorical,

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What I seek to underline, however, is that this rejection plays a key role in Dante’s critique of the conventional lyric tradition and his own divergence from it. In this sense, I agree with Barolini that Folco is intended to point to a synthesis beyond his own dichotomies. However, I hope to have further substantiated this perspective: first, by emphasizing the considerable extent to which the depiction of Folco in Venus corresponds to the (Guittonian) dualism established in his post-conversion poetry; and secondly, by showing how Dante implicates Folco in a critique of courtly ideology that can be traced back through the Purgatorio and the Inferno. Folco perfectly suits Dante’s needs in the Paradiso. His bipartite career makes him a prime example of a poet who recognized the limitations of courtly literature, resolutely leaving it behind, but without encroaching upon the Commedia’s uniquely synthetic operation. He allowed Dante to reflect one last time upon the conundrum posed by the courtly lyric, while also underlining the lack of a pre-existing solution to it. We can in this sense draw a fruitful parallel between, on the one hand, the Commedia’s treatment of Arnaut and Folco, and, on the other, its treatment of Statius and Virgil in Purgatorio XXI–XXII.78 In both cases, a commitment to a faulty creed (fin’amor for Arnaut, paganism for Virgil) sees the greater poet—whether the ‘altissimo poeta’ of the ancient world or the ‘miglior fabbro’ of the vernacular Middle Ages—compromised, while the lesser poet attains a higher moral standing in light of his greater spiritual conviction. Statius was a lesser writer than Virgil, to whose Aeneid he professes to be fundamentally and intimately indebted (‘la qual mamma / fummi, e fummi nutrice’ [it was my mamma and my nurse]: Purg. XXI, 97–8), but he was saved—unlike the Mantuan—on account of his concealed faith.79 For Barolini, Statius is a character who can ‘bring out Virgil’s ambivalence’;80 one whose triumphs are ‘less his successes than overtly sensual language (‘s’io m’intuassi come tu t’inmii’; Par. IX, 81) comes not from the former troubadour, but from Dante-pilgrim. (Picone sees these lines as evidence of ‘la piena corrispondenza ideologica e sentimentale’ [the full ideological and amatory correspondence] between Dante and Folco ‘Paradiso IX’, p. 77.) Moreover, the first half of Folco’s speech, in which he describes his birthplace through a meandering twelve-line periphrasis, serves as a fairly generic introduction to his character (compare Suitner, p. 643). Perhaps the descriptions of Folco as ‘cara gioia’ and ‘cara cosa’, noted by Barolini, are the most plausible tribute to his poetic past, but they do not deflect from the fact that references to his career as a love poet are, if present at all, so oblique as to be practically invisible. 78 On Virgil and Statius, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 256–69; C. Kleinhenz, ‘The Celebration of Poetry: A Reading of Purgatorio XXII’, DS, 106 (1988), 21–41; R. Martinez, ‘Dante and the Two Canons: Statius in Virgil’s Footsteps (Purgatorio 21–30)’, Comparative Literature Studies, 32:2 (1995), 151–75. 79 Of course, the pathos we feel towards Virgil here is increased by the fact that Statius’s conversion came about thanks to his reading of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. 80 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 258.

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Virgil’s failures’.81 Similarly, we might say that Folco brings out the ambivalence that Dante feels towards Arnaut, and towards the lyric tradition as a whole. The saved ex-troubadour is surely to be seen as an inferior love poet to Arnaut, whose pre-eminence in the Romance tradition (‘soverchiò tutti’ [surpassed them all]) is made as explicit as Virgil’s in the classical tradition (‘de li altri poeti onore e lume’: [glory and light of all other poets]: Inf. I, 82). Folco, however, radically redirected his ardour while alive in a manner that eluded Arnaut. In both cases, Dante shows how the greatest poetry hitherto—whether lyric or epic, medieval or classical—has not been adequately reconciled with Christian commitment. And thus, in both cases, our attention is inexorably drawn to the success of the Commedia: Dante, unlike his precursors, integrates erotic and spiritual desire, just as he integrates epic poetry and Christianity, to become a fully fledged Christian auctor in whom epic and lyric discourses are harmonized and their latent potential fulfilled.

5.3 FOLCO, DIDO, DANTE: EROS, GENDER, AND CONVERSION So far my reading of Folco has emphasized the affinities between his poetry and that of the converted Guittone. While for a number of reasons he fares far better in Dante’s literary historiography, Folco’s poetic path to God—like that of the Aretine poet—is predicated upon an emphatic rupture from the lyric mode. In other words, his conversionary path, and that associated with the heaven of Venus, is distinct from that integrative emphasis that I associate with Dante. The schism implied in Folco’s description of his erotic past as ‘la colpa, ch’a mente non torna’ sharply contrasts with Dante’s assertion that his loyalty to Beatrice, for all her associations with the erotic, has been unwavering (‘non m’è il seguire al mio canto cantar preciso’ [pursuit of her in my song has never been cut off]: Par. XXX, 30). It is this emphasis on continuity that gives Dante’s Commedia a very different complexion. Yet not all Dante’s poetry, as we have seen at various points in this book, shares the Commedia’s stress on integration. We have seen how the canzone ‘Le dolci rime’, the lyric in Dante’s corpus most easily harmonized with the poetics of the Convivio, was highly reminiscent of Guittone’s ‘Ora parrà’, and by extension Folco’s ‘Chantars mi torna ad afan’, in its clear movement away from the lyric ambit of love, its suppression of desire and subjectivity, and its tending 81

Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 267.

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towards abstraction and universality. It is therefore intriguing and significant that it is in Venus that Dante, through Charles Martel, cites his own canzone ‘Voi ch’intendendo’: a poem emblematic of his transition from Beatrice to the ‘donna gentile’ and, by association, from the Vita nova to the Convivio. At the beginning of the pilgrim’s exchange with Charles in canto VIII, the former prince states: ‘Noi ci volgiam coi principi celesti d’un giro e d’un girare e d’una sete, ai quali tu del mondo già dicesti: “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete”; e sem sì pien d’amor, che, per piacerti, non fia men dolce un poco di quïete’. (Par. VIII, 34–9) [In one orbit we revolve with these celestial princes—in one circle, with one circling, and with a single thirst—to whom, from the world, you addressed these words: ‘You who, by understanding, move the third heaven’. We are filled with love but, to give you pleasure, a little respite will be no less sweet to us.]

We might expect that the canzone cited in the Paradiso would be the most in tune with the Commedia’s prevailing ideology and objectives. Yet while we find no explicit rebuke here, no declaration on the part of Charles or Dante that ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ was an ‘errant’ text, critics have often interpreted the autocitation in Venus—like that of the Convivio’s ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ in Purgatorio II—as in some way palinodic or corrective in intent.82 There are certainly subtle ways in which Dante undermines the canzone: Picone has noted the ‘distancing’ language used by Charles in describing the poem as remote both from Heaven and from the present time (‘ai quali tu del mondo già dicesti’).83 Moreover, Dante corrects the earlier poem on a question of angelology: while in the canzone he claimed that the order of angels governing this heaven were the Thrones, he now learns at first hand that they are, in fact, the Principalities.84 There is no doubt more at stake than this particular intellectual misdemeanour, however, and it would seem likely that Dante is critiquing in some way the limited reach of a work founded on reason rather than revelation—that of ‘a secular thinker, whose attention was focused more on the mysteries of this world than of Heaven’.85 Rachel Jacoff believes 82 On all three autocitations, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 3–84. On palinode in Dante, and a critique of its limitations as a mode of inquiry, see Ascoli, pp. 274–300. 83 See M. Picone, ‘Canto VIII’, in Güntert and Picone, eds, Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, pp. 119–32 (p. 123). 84 See Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 70–5. 85 Barański, ‘Dante’s Biblical Linguistics’, p. 126.

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Dante alludes to his former self here in the same spirit as Cunizza (‘mi vinse il lume d’esta stella’) and Folco (‘la colpa ch’a mente non torna’).86 In other words, while the poet’s attitude towards the canzone and his ‘prior allegiance to philosophy’ is negative,87 we find no explicit expression of regret, since Dante, like Folco and Cunizza, may now behold his misadventure with a ‘post-palinodic’ serenity.88 She too highlights the dualism of the earlier work, arguing that the ‘dead end of the Convivio is both philosophical and poetic. In that work Dante keeps separate what he will later unite’.89 Barolini also regards the citation of ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ as palinodic, and believes the dualism of the Convivio to be implicated in Dante’s veiled critique of the canzone, but configures the relationship between the texts slightly differently. 90 She argues that the canzone finds itself cited in this heaven because, like the characters we find there, it is dichotomous. She believes the canzone is cited as a ‘poem of conflict’, since, at the time of its composition (or at least its insertion into the Convivio), Dante saw his love for philosophy and his love for Beatrice as conflictual.91 For Barolini, ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ thus embodies a limited kind of transcendence, an integration manqué, which falls short of the needs of the Commedia and points ahead towards the fusion of love and politics uniquely achieved in the ‘poema sacro’.92 According to this persuasive reading, the poet’s attitude towards ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ (and, by extension, the Convivio) in the Paradiso is seen as essentially ambivalent, rather than (as Jacoff would seem to suggest) wholly negative. It is cited in a positive light insofar as it saw Dante open up his poetry to weightier public and political themes (and here, if not in the Convivio’s 86

87 Jacoff, ‘Post-Palinodic’, p. 115. Jacoff, ‘Post-Palinodic’, p. 115. ‘In Paradiso VIII, Dante’s relationship to his earlier work is palinodic in intent, but post-palinodic in emotion. Dante relates to his earlier work here, as the souls of Folco [and] Cunizza . . . relate to their sinful or erroneous lives. The smile of these souls implies a way of looking at the past equally free of guilt and of nostalgia’: Jacoff, ‘Post-Palinodic’, p. 120. 89 Jacoff, ‘Post-Palinodic’, p. 115. She continues: ‘The limits [of the Convivio] are precisely the raison d’être of its successor’ (p. 118). 90 Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 57–84. 91 ‘ “Voi che ’ntendendo” is a poem about conflict, the conflict experienced by the poet between his love for Beatrice—his mystical, spiritual and poetical interests—and the other chief interests of his life. . . . The fact that Cunizza and Folquet are converts from folle amore is registered not positively but negatively, by the duality of their discourses and by the compensation that dictates their political diatribes. The textual status thus assigned by the poet to the third heaven, conceived as the representation of a stage in which the elements of a prior conflict and duality are still visible although no longer conflicting, accounts for the presence and choice of this particular autocitation’: Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 68–9. 92 Barolini notes that the pervasive dualities of this heaven are transcended in canto X (that is, beyond the earth’s shadow), where ‘Love is newly defined in relation to the dynamics of the Trinity: “Guardando nel suo Figlio con l’Amore / che l’uno e l’altro etternalmente spira” ’: Dante’s Poets, p. 68. 88

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philosophical emphasis, Dante might be compared to Folco), but in a negative light insofar as it also ‘posit[ed] a conflict that was in fact unnecessary’, a conflict between, on the one hand, ethical and political engagement and, on the other, the poet’s commitment to Beatrice.93 This way of framing the relationship between the two texts supports my own reading of them, and reinforces the poetic distinction between Folco and the Dante of the Commedia (and an essential affinity between Folco, Fra Guittone, and the Dante of the Convivio) that I have attempted to set out in this chapter. In the remaining pages of this chapter I would like to reflect, in light of what I have considered hitherto, on the interrelation of three aspects of the Heaven of Venus and their wider resonances and implications: the presence of the converted Folco, his self-comparison to the classical figure of Dido, and the status of the Convivio as evoked in the citation of ‘Voi che ’ntentendo’. Together these elements help to illuminate and reinforce my reading of Dante’s own poetics of integration in the Commedia and some of the dualistic models—courtly, classical, and indeed autobiographical—that serve as counterpoints in his elaboration of a distinctive poetics and notion of desire. My discussion of the Convivio in Chapter 1 emphasized its devaluation of eros and its suppression of lyric discourse, whether in the allegorical prism through which it approached the amatory canzoni in Books II and III or in the dialectical framework used to frame Dante’s evolution of a writer, that posited a simplistic opposition between passion and virtue and thereby underplayed the complexity and the rational and intellective basis of the Vita nova’s notion of love. Its movement from the sphere of love to that of ethics coincided with a confinement of love to fervent passion. We might compare this transition from the lyric realm to a more ‘virile’ and public poetic stance to Folquet’s transition to Folco. In the crusade lyric ‘Chantars mi torna ad afan’, this took the form of a remonstration against earthly love and a refusal to privilege it among worldly desires. In the Commedia’s rendering of Folco as character, meanwhile, his erotic and lyric past is reduced to his ‘colpa’, as he compares himself to the lustful classical figures: Phyllis, Hercules, and Dido. 93 ‘The status of “Voi che ’ntendendo” in the Comedy hinges on the fact that the canzone marks a turning point, a crucial watershed, in Dante’s career. Its position in Dante’s canon is in fact analogous to that of the Convivio. From the perspective of the Comedy, the Convivio is both an erring text that has been eclipsed by the return to Beatrice as a primary source of signification, and also—paradoxically—the text that makes the Comedy possible’ (Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 78). As Barolini points out (see Dante’s Poets pp. 80–4), this conflict is, in fact, much more explicit in the non-allegorical canzone ‘Le dolci rime’, where, as we saw, Dante temporarily rejected the ‘matera amorosa’. Barolini believes that Dante opts to cite ‘Voi che ’ntendendo’ instead, however, because it shares its stilnovist lexis and intellective stress (‘Voi che ’ntendendo’) with the two canzoni cited in the Purgatorio.

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This reference to Dido is especially interesting and has a web of associations in a Dantean context.94 In addition to her more celebrated appearances in the Commedia, she appears in Book IV of Dante’s Convivio in a manner that reflects and reinforces the treatise’s wider notion of desire and subjectivity. Book IV sees Dante set out, with continual recourse to the classical auctores, a model of moral and intellectual development known as the ‘four ages of man’: ‘adolescenza’ [adolesence], ‘gioventute’ [maturity], ‘senettute’ [old age], and ‘senio’ [senility] (Conv. IV, xxiii, 4).95 Nobility in each of these ages is manifested in different ways,96 Dante tells us, referring to characters described by four classical auctores. For ‘adolescenza’, he takes examples from Statius’s Thebaid (see Conv. IV, xxv, 6–10); for ‘gioventute’, he uses the example of Virgil’s Aeneas (see xxvi, 8–15); for ‘senetute’, Ovid’s Aeacus (see xxvii, 17–20); and for ‘senio’, Lucan’s Cato and Marcia (see xxviii, 13–19). Of interest to me here is the passage from the first to the second of these ages, from adolescence to maturity. During adolescence, which lasts until the age of twenty-five, Dante tells us that reason has not yet come to full fruition (‘non puote perfettamente la razionale parte discernere’ [the rational part of the soul cannot discriminate with perfection]: Conv. IV, xxiv, 2). Thus, the subject cannot always act nobly without the counsel of an older guide. This dependence is overcome in manhood,97 when the qualities of adolescence are replaced by the need to be ‘temperata’ [selfrestrained], ‘amorosa’ [loving], ‘cortese’ [corteous], and ‘leale’ [loyal] (Conv. IV, xxvi, 2). ‘Gioventute’ is, above all, a time when one learns to master passion (‘questo appetito, che irascibile e concupiscibile si chiama’ [the appetite that is called irascible or concupiscible: Conv. IV, xxvi, 6]) through temperance. Using imagery evocative of the political invective of Purgatorio VI,98 Dante describes how the appetite that is not ‘ridden’ by reason 94 I offer a fuller treatment of Dante’s engagement with Aeneid IV in my essay ‘Dido, Aeneas, and the Evolution of Dante’s Poetics’. 95 Vasoli describes how these ‘four ages’ draw upon pre-existing models, including the Bible, Cicero, Albert the Great, and Brunetto’s Trésor; see Vasoli, introduction to Convivio in Op. min., I, ii, LI. 96 ‘Dove è da sapere che la nostra buona e diritta natura ragionevolemente procede in noi sì come vedemo procedere la natura delle piante in quelle; e però altri costumi e altri portamenti sono ragionevoli ad una etade che ad altra’ [Here it should be observed that our nature when good and upright develops in us according to what is reasonable, just as we perceive that the nature of plants develops in them; and therefore some manners and some kinds of behaviour are more reasonable at one age than at another] (Conv. IV, xxiv, 8). 97 While ‘gioventute’ would seem to denote ‘youth’, it in fact refers to the ‘colmo de la nostra vita’ [the highest point of our life], between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five: see Conv. IV, xxiv, 3. 98 In Purgatorio VI, Dante describes how, since the ‘saddle’ of the Empire is empty, Italy has become a ‘fiera fatta fella’ [beast not goaded] (line 94). This echoes the Convivio’s conviction that the Emperor should act as ‘cavalcatore de la umana volontade’ [he who rides in the saddle of the human will] (Conv. IV, ix, 10). This can be linked to the role of the

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resembles a ‘sciolto cavallo’ [horse set loose]. In ‘gioventute’ desire ought to be definitively ruled by reason and maternal affection replaced by the patriarchal discipline that affords us access to the social order: ‘Onde, sì come, nato, tosto lo figlio alla tetta della madre s’apprende, così, tosto come alcuno lume d’animo in esso appare, si dee volgere alla correzione del padre, e lo padre lui amaestrare’ [So as a child clings to its mother’s breast as soon as it is born, likewise as soon as some light appears in his mind he ought to turn to the correction of his father, and his father should give him instruction] (Conv. IV, xxiv, 14). The archetypal example of this temperance and surpassing of youthful affection is Virgil’s Aeneas, and specifically his ultimate rejection of Dido’s siren call in order to carry out his public duty of founding Rome: E quanto raffrenare fu quello, quando, avendo ricevuto da Dido tanto di piacere quanto di sotto nel settimo trattato si dicerà, e usando con essa tanto di diletazzione, elli si partio, per seguire onesta e laudabile via e fruttosa, come nel quarto dell’Eneida scritto è! (Conv. IV, xxvi, 8) [How great was his restraint when, having experienced so much pleasure with Dido, as will be recounted below in the seventh book, and having derived from her so much gratification, he took his departure from her to follow an honourable, praiseworthy, and profitable path, as is recorded in the fourth book of the Aeneid!]

As has been shown by critics, this reading of Virgil is closely informed by a medieval tradition of Christian allegorizers—such as Bernardus Silvestris, John of Salisbury, and Fulgentius—who interpreted the first half of the Aeneid in precisely these terms, with Books IV–VI demonstrating reason’s victory over passion.99 Indeed, Dido was construed by these exegetes as little more than a symbol of concupiscence, while Lavinia,

‘rein’ of law, designed to curb cupidity, described in Purg. XVI (‘Onde convenne legge per fren porre’ [Therefore, there was need that laws be set to act as curbs: Purg. XVI, 94]). 99 On Dante and medieval allegorizing of the Aeneid, see Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, 99–106; Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 147–91; David Thompson, Dante’s Epic Journeys (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 20–8; D. WilsonOkamura, ‘Lavinia and Beatrice: The Second Half of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages’, Dante Studies, 119 (2001), 103–24. Ulrich Leo argues that before writing chapter XXV of Convivio IV, Dante reread the classics (especially the Aeneid and its account of Aeneas’s descent into the Hades in Book VI)—a reading that would soon inspire the discontinuation of the Convivio and the genesis of the Commedia. Virgil is suddenly described in strikingly effusive terms (‘lo maggior nostro poeta’) and references to his poetry proliferate. And while Dante’s prior references to the Aeneid (and to the other classical auctores) had been rather perfunctory, those hereafter bespeak a careful, personal, and original interpretation; see U. Leo, ‘The Unfinished Convivio and Dante’s Rereading of the Aeneid’, Medieval Studies, 13 (1951), 41–64.

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Aeneas’s future wife, was interpreted as the virtue attained through following the road of toil.100 The opposition between passion and reason set out here, and the need to surpass earthly affection in espousing virility, is reinforced a little later in the chapter, where Dante describes how nobility in manhood is also concomitant with being ‘amoroso’. We might expect Dante here to ascribe some value to human love, to propose—as he does in ‘Doglia mi reca’—a form of human love that can ‘dwell in reason’s garden’. Instead, ‘love’ is restricted to purely familial, asexual bonds: convienesi amare li suoi maggiori, dalli quali ha ricevuto ed essere e nutrimento e dottrina, sì che esso non paia ingrato; convienesi amare li suoi minori, acciò che, amando quelli, dea loro delli suoi beneficii, per li quali poi nelle minore prosperitade esso sia da loro sostenuto e onorato. E questo amore mostra che avesse Enea lo nomato poeta nel quinto libro sopra detto, quando lasciò li vecchi Troiani in Cicilia racomandati ad Aceste, e partilli dalle fatiche; e quando amaestrò in questo luogo Ascanio suo figliuolo, colli altri adolescenti armeggiando. (Conv. IV, xxvi, 10–11) [It is appropriate for one to love one’s juniors, so that by loving them it may give them some of its benefits by which it may later, when its prosperity diminishes, derive support and honour from them. As the previously named poet shows in the fifth book mentioned above, this is the love that Aeneas had when he left the aged Trojans behind in Sicily, entrusting them to the care of Acestes, and released them from their labours, and when in this same site he prepared his young son Ascanius, with the other youths, for tournament games.]

Again using Aeneas as the prime exemplum of maturity, Dante describes how the kind of love befitting the nobleman is a love directed towards one’s elders and minors, evading the question of whether there can exist a valorized ‘amor’ between lovers. We can see, in both these instances, how the Convivio’s prose endorses a classicizing paradigm of desire, selfhood, and gender that devalues human love, just as it devalues the literal sense of its allegorical canzoni. In this sense, the Renaissance title for the work, L’amoroso Convivio, could not be more misleading. Thus we see that Dante interpreted Virgil’s paradigm of desire, at least as presented in Aeneid IV, as a fundamentally dualistic one, according to which eros and rationality—and by extension eros and virile probity— emerge as inimical. We might expect this paradigm to be of little use to the author of the Vita nova and the Commedia—works that after all endeavour to forge a middle way between eros and spirituality. Yet it in fact proves 100 ‘Dido, id est libido’ [Dido, that is lust], writes Bernardus (see Hawkins, ‘Dido, Beatrice, and the Signs of Ancient Love’, p. 119).

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consonant with the Convivio’s broader handling of desire and its particular treatment of Dante’s own authorial development. As we saw in Chapter 1, the opening pages of the Convivio frame this development in terms of an opposition between the ‘fervid and passionate’ love of the Vita nova and the ‘temperate and virile’ properties of the Convivio. This, he says, corresponds to the two ‘ages’ to which the works respectively pertain: Ché altro si conviene e dire e operare ad una etade che ad altra; per che certi costumi sono idonei e laudabili ad una etade che sono sconci e biasimevoli ad altra, sì come di sotto, nel quarto trattato di questo libro, sarà propria ragione mostrata. E io in quella dinanzi, all’entrata della mia gioventute parlai, e in questa dipoi, quella già trapassata. (Conv. I, i, 17) [For it is proper to speak and act differently at different ages, because certain manners are fitting and praiseworthy at one age that at another are unbecoming and blameworthy, as will be shown below with appropriate reasoning in the fourth book. I wrote the former work only at the threshold of my maturity, and this one after I had already passed through it.]

Dante presents the Vita nova as written on the threshold of adolescence and manhood. In associating the work with the former, he associates it with an age when our rational capacity is not yet fully developed (‘non puote perfettamente la razionale parte discernere’), an idea that of course runs very much contrary to the Vita nova’s own anti-Cavalcantian insistence upon the unwavering influence of reason upon Dante’s love for Beatrice. As alluded to in Chapter 1, this opposition between love and rationality resurfaces in the next chapter of the treatise, as Dante explains his motivations for explicating his allegorical canzoni: Temo la infamia di tanta passione avere seguita, quanta concepe chi legge le sopra nominate canzoni in me avere segnoreggiata: la quale infamia si cessa, per lo presente di me parlare, interamente, lo quale mostra che non passione ma vertù sia stata la movente cagione. (Conv. I, ii, 16) [I fear the infamy of having yielded myself to the great passion that anyone who reads the canzoni mentioned above must realize once ruled me. This infamy will altogether cease as I speak now about myself and show that my motivation was not passion but virtue.]

Eager once again to distance the Convivio from earthly love—owing to a fear in this case that his allegorical canzoni might be read literally—Dante draws a line between ‘passione’ and ‘vertù’, which corresponds to the lines drawn between the Vita nova and the Convivio in the previous chapter and between adolescence and manhood in Book IV. There is no suggestion in either passage that love, cast as inherently intemperate, might exist in harmony with the kind of mature virtue that serves as the ‘movente cagione’ of the present treatise.

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In both instances, I would argue that the author of the ‘quasi commento’ (Conv. I, iii, 2) fashions himself as an Aeneas, Book IV’s archetypal exemplum of noble manhood, in moving away from the passion of youth ‘per seguire onesta e laudabile via e fruttosa’ [to follow an honourable, praiseworthy, and profitable path]. We can note parallels between the Convivio’s descriptions of Aeneas and of Dante himself, with the words ‘la infamia di tanta passione avere seguita’ [the infamy of having yielded to so great a passion] regarding Dante foreshadowing the phrase ‘avendo ricevuto da Dido tanto di piacere . . . e tanto di diletazzione’ [having experienced so much pleasure with Dido] used with respect to Aeneas. It would seem possible, indeed, that both these passages draw upon the Aeneid itself, which uses several similar Latin expressions to describe Dido’s own immoderate desires.101 The unusually zealous sentence that describes the agony of Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido (‘E quanto raffrenare fu quello!’ [What restraint he showed!])—and that Ulrich Leo describes as ‘vibrating with personal emotion’102—also points to the author’s identification with Aeneas, no doubt in his own putative transition from the ‘passionate’ love poetry of the Vita nova to the ‘virile’ writing of the Convivio. (I say ‘putative’ since Dante, of course, continued to write erotic verse.) The essence of each figure’s transition from passion to temperance lies in a movement from private to public affairs; just as Aeneas forsakes his dalliance with Dido to fulfil his imperial duty, so Dante’s supposed abandonment of the love lyric is seen as giving way to the greater ethical and political engagement of the Convivio. In both cases, the affective, subjective, and private appear in stark opposition to the ‘virtuous’, universal, and public. Gender, too, proceeds along Virgilian lines and is configured more conservatively than in the Vita nova and Commedia, with the donna cast not as a conduit to redemption but a potentially treacherous ‘other’ in the journey to moral maturity. The only way in which the figure of the lady can be squared with the Convivio’s poetics is by way of the allegorical exposition of the canzoni for Lady Philosophy,

101 ‘Sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros / et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem’ [‘But if you have so much longing to learn our suffering, to hear in short the final calamity of Troy’: Aen. II, 10–11; ‘quando optima Dido / nesciat et tantos rumpi non speret amores’ [‘with gracious Dido still aware of nothing and never dreaming that so great a love could be broken’: Aen. IV, 291–2]; ‘Non tamen Anna novis praetexere funera sacris / germanam credit, nec tantos mente furores / concipit aut graviora timet quam morte Sychaei’ [‘But Anna cannot dream her sister hides a funeral behind these novel rites; her mind is far from thinking of such frenzy; and she fears nothing worse than happened when Sychaeus died’: Aen. IV, 500–2]. 102 Leo, p. 59. Leo sees this as an example of Dante’s freshly engaged reading of the classical poet.

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herself a ‘personified abstraction of disembodied rationality’.103 The Convivio is really most at ease when it can forego a subjective, erotic poetics entirely, as in ‘Le dolci rime’. If the author of the Convivio may be seen to fashion himself as a temperate Aeneas, it is intriguing that in the ‘rima petrosa’ ‘Così nel mio parlar’, also belonging to this ideologically anomalous ‘middle period’ of Dante’s career and seemingly evoked intertextually at the beginning of Paradiso VIII, the poet likens himself to the fervent Dido. Wholly objectified by his love, he describes the ‘donna petrosa’ standing over him with the sword with which Dido killed herself: ‘E m’ha percosso in terra, e stammi sopra / con quella spada ond’elli ancise Dido’ [Love has struck me to the ground and stands over me with the sword with which he slew Dido] (Rime 46.35–6). While Dante in the Convivio defines himself, like Aeneas, in terms of his mastery of passion, the Dante of the ‘petrose’ defines himself in terms of his absolute submission to it. Unlike in the Vita nova, love for Dante in the decade prior to the inception of the Commedia is either suppressed or else presented as deadly and tyrannical. The paths of rectitude and of love are inherently diverging—the former leads to Rome and to public duty; the latter to Carthage, to immoderation, and self-destruction, as Dante the love poet and Dante the cantor rectitudinis begin to follow separate paths. It thus seems to me highly pertinent that Folco in Paradiso IX compares himself to Dido, who is starkly confined to his pre-conversionary past. Since erotic love for Folco, as embodied by Dido, could only be frenzied and destructive, it had to be rejected, defined in sharp contrast with his later ecclesiastical identity. The self-indulgent passion (‘ardere’) of ‘folle amore’ is altogether forgotten, as Folco describes the public ruin wrought by avarice. The conversion described by Folco the poet in ‘Chantars mi torna ad afan’ also describes the poet’s turning away from the passion of fin’amor to enter into the public arena. In this sense, Folco embodies the transition set out in the Convivio from ‘fervid’ adolescence to ‘temperate’ manhood, from private ‘passione’ to public ‘vertù’—from Folquet the troubadour to Folco the bishop. The opposition is also a gendered one, between the feminine Dido and Phyllis and the masculine Folco, that maps onto the opposition between the ardent Dido and the coolly temperate Aeneas as set out in the Convivio. In both cases there is an 103 R. A. Shoaf, ‘Dante’s “colombi” and the Figuralism of Hope’, Dante Studies, 93 (1975), 27–59 (p. 37). When Beatrice returns in the Earthly Paradise she appears, by contrast, strikingly concrete and embodied. Leo contrasts the Commedia’s continual emphasis on vision and revelation with the abstract rationality and faith that are the pillars of the Convivio—a work that he says ‘might have been written by a blind man’ (p. 51).

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implicit feminization of the affective lyric sphere, also encapsulated in the Convivio’s opposition ‘tetta de la madre’/‘correzione del padre’. There is also an emphasis upon a transition from a feminized lyric passivity to virile activity. In the Commedia lust and wanton erotic passion are defined in terms of a passive submission, from Inferno V (‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’ [who submit their reason to desire]: 39; also reflected in the soul’s subordination to the violent ‘bufera’) to Purgatorio XXVI (‘seguendo come bestie l’appetito’ [following their appetites like beasts]: line 84) to Paradiso IX (‘mi vinse il lume d’esta stella’ [I was overcome by this star’s splendour]: line 33), while in the Convivio too we saw that Dante fears ‘la infamia di tanta passione avere seguita’ [the infamy of having followed so great a passion]. We saw above how Folco in the crusade canzoni, as well as his character in Paradiso IX, abandoned his lyric self to issue moral instruction; how Dante in the Convivio distanced himself from his Vita nova in composing a ‘temperate and virile’ work befitting maturity; how Aeneas similarly overcame his submission to (female) passion in abandoning Dido and embarking on a voyage associated with his depersonalized political destiny; how Fra Guittone ‘sealed’ himself from the passive and feminized objectification associated with love and lyric poetry (‘d’Amor non punto’ [unpierced by love]) in espousing a new ‘projective’ poetic persona. At stake, then, is a cluster of figures, encompassing courtly and classical models and traditions, who represent variations on a fundamentally dualistic conversionary model that pits passion against rationality, lyric intimacy against epic universality, passive submission to love against active participation in public discourse. Such a model, according to the reading I propose in this book, represents something crucially distinct from the pathway to God followed by the poet of the Commedia.104 For Folco, for Aeneas, for Fra Guittone, and for Dante himself in the Convivio, erotic love as embodied by Dido must be confined to the past. It is thus intriguing and illuminating that Dante appropriates and ‘reclaims’ the identity of Dido herself when he appears before Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, translating her phrase ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae’ in the words ‘conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’ [I know the signs of the ancient flame] (Purg. XXX, 48). As noted in Chapter 2, 104

One should note, however, that the Convivio’s chapters on the ‘four ages of man’ are evoked and endorsed in other contexts in the Commedia. In Inferno XXVII, Guido da Montefeltro’s account of his (failed) return to God in his later years closely adheres to the model of ‘senio’ established in Convivio IV, whereby the ‘seniore’ should in old age lower his metaphorical sails, cut his ties to earthly things, and eagerly return to the celestial ‘port’ (compare Conv. IV, xxviii, 7–8 and Inf. XXVII, 79–81). Purgatorio XVI–XVIII, meanwhile, where Marco Lombardo and Virgil describe the nature of desire and its relationship to reason, correspond to reason’s ‘harnessing’ of desire as described in the treatise.

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this line emphasizes an unlikely recuperation of Dante’s affective past, even here at the summit of Purgatorio—a cantica associated with relinquishing earthly identity and affections. It also signals the improbable presence and redemption of eros at the core of his ‘sacred poem’. Dante does not face a fork in the road between love and probity, as in the examples set out above, but rather aligns them. He simultaneously identifies with Dido and Aeneas (his self-identification with the latter in the Inferno is well known), rather than pitting the two figures against one another: a microcosmic illustration of the poem’s wider integrative emphasis. The pilgrim is beholden to love, and aspires to a condition not of cool temperance but, especially in the Paradiso, of radical passivity and receptiveness. As Heather Webb has recently noted, he ‘must learn to exercise passivity throughout his journey through Paradiso, to find peace within a state of ardent desire that does not permit him to act, but only to submit’.105 The terms at stake here (‘passivity’, ‘ardent desire’, ‘submission’) place him firmly at odds with his former self in the Convivio—as well as with courtly converts Fra Guittone and Folco and the classical archetype of dispassionate temperance, Aeneas. Folco, then, while often excluded from the Commedia discourse on love and love poetry, or else aligned rather reductively with Dante in his own transition from courtly poetry to divine service, represents a crucial point of contrast and comparison in evaluating Dante’s poetics and handling of love in the Commedia. While their relationship is not straightforwardly contrapuntal, Folco encapsulates one of the modes of poetic and spiritual conversion that Dante carefully negotiates and ultimately rejects in the poem, and offers illuminating interconnections to others—whether (anti-) courtly, classical, or autobiographical. In tracing Dante’s departure from Folco’s paradigm, we bear witness to his innovative handling of a number of normative oppositions typically used to frame his poetic as well as spiritual conversion. If other vernacular lyric poets have achieved redemption, according to the Commedia’s perspective, only Dante has done so through his amatory verse.

105 H. Webb, ‘Power Differentials, Unreliable Models, and Homoerotic Desire in the Comedy’, Italian Studies, 68.1 (March 2013), 17–35 (p. 34). On this condition of passivity see also Burgwinkle, ‘Modern Lovers’, for whom ‘the pilgrim becomes a passive voyager whose very success can be measured by the loss of his hold on sensual containment’ (p. 25).

Conclusion This book has offered a reappraisal of two strongly interrelated aspects of Dante’s work. Part I explored Dante’s ‘poetics of integration’—his tendency to approach transformatively some of the cultural dialectics that circumscribed his ambitions as a writer. In particular, it focused on the question of love, and Dante’s attempts to harmonize eros and spirituality. It argued that these attempts were informed not only by the interplay between different forms of love in different spheres of Dante’s own culture, but also by his attempts to formulate a spiritually tenable and authoritative vernacular poetry, and his conviction that a properly inspired vernacular poetics must be an embodied and subjective poetics of love. Having focused predominantly on Dante’s ‘minor’ works, I then focused on some key episodes from the Commedia and highlighted, in spite of the divinely inspired basis he claims for his poem, the author’s enduring erotic commitment and ‘lyrical’ self-presentation. These analyses of Dante’s texts together propose a reading of his work that resists a dualistic interpretation of his handling of love and his secular lyric heritage, and emphasizes instead the audacious continuity upon which I claim Dante insists. Part II substantiated this argument through a close analysis of Dante’s engagement with Guittone d’Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseilles. In these chapters I emphasized Dante’s eventual departure from a dualistic mode of conversion common to Guittone and Folco, and his privileging of vernacular poetry, through Arnaut, as a locus in which to express desire and subjectivity. While other poets, such as Guittone and Folco, previously espoused religious, political, and didactic content, Dante’s poetry in the Commedia retains an indissoluble connection to love, and forges a new, middle way between erotic and spiritual commitment, an unlikely redemption of—and indeed through—love poetry. Dante’s epic poem is simultaneously a radically reimagined lyric poem, defined by lyric desire as well as by epic narration. The poetry of the Commedia, at once eroticized and theologized, is specular of Beatrice, the figure who inspires it. There is, indeed, no more pertinent avenue of insight into the integrative aspirations of Dante’s poetry than the ‘miraculous’ Beatrice herself, who incorporates so many

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disparate, if not competing, elements: earthly and divine love, body and spirit, time and eternity, femininity and masculinity, desire and intellect, philosophy and theology, the secular and the sacred. These elements converge in Beatrice and in the love, and the poetry, that she generates. In this sense, as in many others, Beatrice stands in opposition to the Convivio’s rationalistic, disembodied, depersonalized Lady Philosophy. Another overarching aim of this book has, indeed, been to reframe the relationship between the Convivio and Commedia, less in terms of their intellectual tensions and affinities than in terms of the dissent between the poetics of the two works, their respective dualistic and integrative bases. The Commedia is thus Dante’s radical solution to a cluster of tensions he identified between his spiritual and his poetic convictions and obligations. But while revolutionary, it is a culminating and not a preliminary text; love poets in the Commedia may only share the dubious honour of pointing forward—in their limitations—to the unique successes of the poem in which they appear. As such, the Commedia closes more doors with respect to love poetry than it opens, and does not have a shaping effect upon the subsequent lyric landscape. As Elena Lombardi rightly puts it, ‘The radical “angelification” of Beatrice, elevating extramarital attraction to the utmost orthodoxy of divine love, is an outrageously innovative idea, but it is, poetically and culturally, untenable.’1 In other words, the poem does not fashion itself as a model to be emulated but rather, like Beatrice herself, as a unique and unrepeatable poetic event. Accordingly, Guittonian dualism, albeit with a very different linguistic and psychological inflection, is reasserted in the Canzoniere of Petrarch, the dominant model for European love poets in the following centuries. Petrarch’s concluding canzone to the Virgin famously and polemically brands her the ‘vera Beatrice’, thereby undermining the audacious poetic and metaphysical claims associated with Dante’s beloved, and reasserting the primacy and exclusivity of Mary as a spiritually legitimate source of poetic inspiration. For all that the spectre of a redemptive Dantean love haunts the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s Laura cannot serve as the vehicle of transcendence he desires, and he ultimately negates the possibility of a lyric redemption. As for Guittone, Arnaut, and Folco, a decisive turning away from the beloved is the eventual cost of the poet’s salvation. For Dante, we have seen that the converse is true. It is by reigniting his ‘antica fiamma’, submitting to his ‘antico amor’, re-espousing the lyric identity of his ‘vita nova’, that the portal to salvation is opened. This love is transmuted into something radically new, but is never dissociated from the poet’s erotic past. 1

Lombardi, Wings, p. 62.

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Index Adam 17 n. 11, 53–4, 141, 178 Adelais (beloved of Folco) 207, 216, 222–3 Aeneas 8, 41, 63 n. 7, 64, 76, 239–46 Albigensian Crusades 7, 19, 24–5 n. 43, 207–8 Alighieri, Pietro 1 n. 1 Allegory 1, 13, 19, 22–4, 31–2, 34–6, 40–1, 46, 60, 80 n. 49, 84–6, 134, 136–9, 145, 153 n. 123, 238, 240–2 Allegretti, Paola 198 n. 114 Allen, Judson Boyce 39 Antonelli, Roberto 153, 214 n. 31 Aquinas, Thomas 17, 40, 140, 213 n. 25, 224, 230 n. 72 Aristotle 13, 32, 36, 51, 79 n. 46, 87, 135 n. 86, 140 n. 96, 144 n. 101, 151 Arnaut Daniel – see Daniel, Arnaut Ascoli, Albert Russell 37, 39–40, 41 n. 86, 43 Asperti, Stefano 212, 214, 224 n. 48, 226 nn. 59, 62 Auerbach, Erich 77 n. 40, 88 St Augustine 16–17, 33, 52–3, 66, 69, 70 n. 23, 72, 74, 82 n. 55, 90 n. 81, 99, 136 Authority Medieval auctoritas 3, 37–48, 58–60, 67, 79, 89 of Love in vernacular poetry 21, 41, 110, 223 Authorship 40–7 Avarice 34, 70, 132, 147, 209–11, 220–1, 233, 244 Avalle, D’Arco Silvio 22, 101 Babel 53 n. 117, 54 Barański, Zygmunt 3 n. 4, 44, 57, 60 n. 1, 68, 78, 158, 162 n. 28, 200–2, 236 Barbi, Michele 104, 134 Barbiellini Amidei, Beatrice 179 Barolini, Teodolinda 8–9, 25, 29, 31–2 n. 64, 34 n. 67, 60 n. 1, 67, 69–70, 77 n. 41, 79 n. 46, 81, 83, 87 n. 73, 97 n. 13, 114, 128, 129 n. 66, 131–2, 139 n. 94, 144 n. 101, 146, 148–51, 153 n. 121, 158, 161, 182 n. 72, 198 nn. 116, 117, 200, 207, 212–13, 216, 220, 222, 226 n. 59, 229 n. 69, 233 n. 77, 234–5, 237–8

Barral (in poetry of Folco) 206–8, 216–18 Beatrice in the Commedia 1, 3, 13, 57, 60–3, 69, 73–90, 136, 152, 196, 200 n. 121, 213, 223, 228, 230, 232–3, 235, 244 n. 103, 245, 247–8 and the Convivio 35–6, 236–8 and Petrarch’s Laura 27, 248 and the Rime 114, 134, 136 interpreted as Theology 1, 62, 85–6 in the Vita nova 30–2, 102–4, 107–8, 112–15, 118, 122–6, 134, 136–7, 223, 242 Beauty 23 n. 38, 31, 62, 71–2, 75, 80–2, 87 n. 73, 108, 112–13, 115–19, 135–7, 150–1 Beltrami, Pietro 158 n. 14, 162 n. 28, 198, 212 nn. 22, 23, 214 n. 36 Benvenuto da Imola 1 n. 1, 24 n. 41, 223 Bergin, Thomas 158 n. 14 Bernard of Clairvaux 17–18, 20, 37, 81 n. 52, 85–6 Bernardus Silvestris 240, 241 n. 100 Bernart de Ventadorn 21, 129–30 n. 69 Bertran de Born 4 n. 7, 162, 212–13, 220 Bible 14–16, 19, 39–41, 44, 74, 80, 83 n. 55, 89–90, 199, 239 n. 95 Blasucci, Luigi 196 n. 109, 203 Boccaccio, Giovanni 1 n. 1 Boethius 30, 72 n. 28, 85 n. 65, 136 n. 89 Bonagiunta da Lucca 89, 94, 193 n. 101, 199–202 Bondanella, Peter 179, 181, 185 nn. 80, 83, 188 Borra, Antonello 128 n. 65, 131, 132 nn. 80, 81, 133 Bossy, Michel Andre 160 n. 17 Botterill, Steven 18 n. 17, 52 Boyde, Patrick 104 n. 30, 115, 135–6 n. 86, 137 nn. 90, 91, 138–9 n. 93, 139 n. 94, 143 n. 99, 146, 148, 181, 184, 186 n. 86, 187, 189 n. 95, 229 Brewster, Scott 42 Burgwinkle, William 130–1 n. 75, 246 n. 105 Cacciaguida 146, 221 Capellanus, Andreas 23–4, 64, 66, 101, 111

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Caritas 15–16, 19, 30, 198, 214 n. 31, 224, 228 Cassell, Anthony 210 n. 16 Casella 71, 83 Cato 71, 76, 239 Cavalcanti, Guido 4–5, 26–7, 30–2, 43, 64, 67–8, 74 n. 35, 96 n. 8, 97 n. 13, 102–5, 112–17, 124–5, 135, 142, 144, 151, 153, 161 n. 24, 183, 184 n. 75, 190, 195, 226–7, 242 Cestaro, Gary 34, 51, 55–7, 202 Chadwick, Henry 17 n. 11 Charles Martel 8, 224, 236 Cherchi, Paolo 93 n. 3, 97 n. 13, 115 n. 52 Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria 69 n. 21, 214 n. 35 Cicero 43, 72 Cino da Pistoia 4, 31–2 n. 64, 64, 104 n. 30, 162 Cioffari, Vincenzo 209 Coassin, Flavia 160 Cocytus 190 n. 95, 202 Coletti, Fernando 213 n. 25 Commentary – see exegesis Contini, Gianfranco 29 n. 58, 67, 93, 135, 136 n. 86, 146 n. 106, 157, 180 n. 67, 182, 197 n. 113 Conversion 3–6, 8, 24, 30–1, 36, 48, 59, 66, 69, 88, 93, 99, 101, 103, 127, 138–9, 150, 152, 207–8, 211, 213, 215–23, 228–9, 233–5, 244–7 Corporeality 18, 49, 55–7, 71, 74–5, 80, 82–4, 86–8 Corti, Maria 78 n. 41 Costanza 224 Courtly love 4–8, 20–7, 64–6, 79 n. 46, 81, 87 n. 73, 90, 98–127, 128–32, 142–5, 151, 155, 166, 171, 174, 177–80, 197–8, 203, 208, 212, 214–20, 224, 227, 231–4, 245–6 Cunizza 209, 224, 228–30, 237 Cupiditas 15, 106, 147–52 Daniel, Arnaut 3–4, 6–7, 24, 27, 67 n. 18, 72–4, 88–9, 95–6, 146, 153, 155–204, 205, 208–9, 212–13, 215, 217, 231–5, 247–8 Dante: works of ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra’ 172, 174–5, 182, 187–8, 190 ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ 35, 71, 136, 137 n. 90, 236 ‘Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia’ 32 n. 64, 67, 184 n. 74

‘Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna’ 181–2, 187–90, 192 Convivio 2, 4, 8, 29, 32–6, 39 n. 74, 45–7, 49–52, 56–7, 58 n. 132, 60, 66, 70–2, 76–9, 87, 136–41, 145, 147 n. 110, 152 n. 119, 184 n. 74, 208, 235–46, 248 ‘Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro’ 182–3, 186 n. 86, 189–91, 227, 244 De vulgari eloquentia 4, 7, 36, 49–50, 52–7, 60, 93, 96, 103, 115, 134, 144 n. 100, 145–6, 157, 162–3, 168, 171–2, 174–5, 181–2, 183–4 n. 74, 195–6, 208–9 Detto d’Amore 157 n. 9 ‘Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire’ 96 n. 9, 106, 134, 146–52, 220, 241 ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ 68, 89, 114–17, 122–3, 137 n. 90, 183, 199–201 ‘Due donne in cima de la mente mia’ 135–7, 151 Fiore 98 n. 15 Inferno I 61, 211, 235 Inferno II 1 n. 1, 61–3, 85, 108, 208 Inferno III 230 Inferno IV 14, 37, 62 n. 6, 164 n. 33, 203 Inferno V 1, 3, 24, 63–9, 89, 136, 153, 164 n. 33, 216, 226–8, 230, 232, 245 Inferno XIII 165 Inferno XIX 211 Inferno XXVI 77 n. 41 Inferno XXVII 245 n. 104 Inferno XXXII 189 ‘Io sento sì d’Amor d’Amor la gran possanza’ 76 ‘Io son venuto al punto de la rota’ 183–6, 188 ‘Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia’ 46, 96 n. 9, 134, 136 n. 86, 137–43, 148, 189, 219, 235, 238 n. 93, 244 Paradiso (in general): 3, 57, 69, 80–90, 126 Paradiso I 80–1, 84 Paradiso II 77 n. 41 Paradiso III 225 Paradiso IV 80–1 Paradiso VIII 77 n. 41, 216, 225–8, 236 Paradiso IX 7–8, 24, 198 n. 117, 209–14, 223–35 Paradiso X 82 n. 55, 84–5 n. 62, 225 n. 56, 237 n. 92 Paradiso XIV 82–4

Index Paradiso XV 221 Paradiso XVII 146 Paradiso XXIV 144 n. 101 Paradiso XXV 13, 152 Paradiso XXVI 53 n. 117, 72 Paradiso XXVII 144 n. 101 Paradiso XXVIII 77 n. 41 Paradiso XXX 81–2, 86, 235 Paradiso XXXI 62 n. 5, 87 Paradiso XXXIII 61, 202 n. 126 ‘Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato’ 67 n. 18, 96 n. 9, 134, 136 n. 86, 139 n. 95, 142–6 Purgatorio (in general) 82–4 Purgatorio I 71, 164 n. 33, 227 n. 63 Purgatorio II 71, 77 n. 41, 236 Purgatorio III 14, 179 n. 66 Purgatorio VI 239–40 Purgatorio XI 96 n. 8, 227 Purgatorio XVI 164 n. 33, 184 n. 75, 239–40 n. 98, 245 n. 104 Purgatorio XVII 60–1, 70, 228, 245 n. 104 Purgatorio XVIII 70–1, 85 n. 63, 127, 152–3, 226, 228, 245 n. 104 Purgatorio XIX 71–2, 75 Purgatorio XXI 234–5 Purgatorio XXII 234–5 Purgatorio XXIV 61, 68, 89–90, 93–4, 103, 115, 153–4, 161, 195, 199–204, 209, 222–3 Purgatorio XXVI 6–7, 24, 27, 67, 72–3, 95, 102–3, 145–6, 153, 157–8, 161, 180, 193–204, 208–9, 217, 230–5, 245 Purgatorio XXVII 73–4, 227, 232–3 Purgatorio XXVIII 74 n. 35, 164 n. 33 Purgatorio XXX 74–7, 245–6 Purgatorio XXXI 71, 75 Purgatorio XXXII 211 Purgatorio XXXIII 211 Rime (in general) 31–2, 60, 66–7 ‘Rime petrose’ 4, 7, 31 n. 64, 67, 78 n. 42, 157, 169, 174, 177, 181–92, 195, 202, 227 ‘Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute’ 134, 146 n. 106, 152 n. 119 Vita nova 1–6, 8, 15 n. 5, 29–36, 41–8, 57–8, 60–1, 66–8, 72, 76–80, 87 n. 73, 89, 96 n. 9, 98–127, 134–7, 139, 141, 145, 151, 153–4, 168, 180, 183, 186 n. 86, 190, 198, 200–1, 208, 223, 236, 238, 241–5, 248 ‘Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’ 35, 134, 136, 208, 236–8

273

Dante da Maiano 96 n. 9, 193 n. 101 Del Monte, Alberto 162 n. 27, 176–7, 186 n. 86, 189 Denomy, Alexander 21–2 n. 30 De Robertis, Domenico 31 n. 62, 138–9 n. 93, 146 De Sanctis, Francesco 97 n. 10, 141 Dido 8, 41, 64, 74, 76, 213 n. 25, 222, 226–7, 238–46 Di Girolamo, Costanzo 160 n. 19, 186–7 n. 86 ‘Dolce stil novo’ 64, 73 n. 32, 89, 94, 103–4, 130, 157, 179 n. 65, 180 n. 68, 181, 185, 192–5, 199–201, 238 n. 93 St Dominic 207 Donati, Forese 198 ‘Donna gentile’ (in Vita nova) 32, 35, 47, 80 n. 49, 106, 123–5, 200 n. 121, 236 Dronke, Peter 126 n. 60, 169 Dualism 1–4, 7–8, 29, 31–6, 46, 59, 60–90, 117, 131, 133–4, 137, 150–1, 155, 191, 207, 223–4, 231–4, 237–8, 241, 245, 247–8 Durling, Robert 182 n. 72, 184–5, 188 Earthly Paradise (in Dante’s Purgatorio) 57, 73–80, 164 n. 33, 211, 244 n. 103, 245–6 Edo, Miguel 167 n. 38 Eliot, T. S. 155 n. 3, 194 Empyrean 81, 86–7, 123, 235 Eros and Authority 2, 41–7 and Beatrice 1, 3, 30–1, 60–3, 69, 73–90, 108, 112–15, 123, 125, 152, 196, 228–30, 232–3, 235, 245–8 in Classical culture 13–14, 41, 64, 73–4, 76–7, 226–7, 238–46 and Courtly love 21–4 as a Destructive force 4, 14, 17, 27, 30–2, 47, 61, 63–9, 77–8, 106–15, 124, 126, 128–9, 133, 151, 181–92, 215–16, 224, 226, 228, 244 and Mysticism 17–20 and Reason/wisdom 4, 26–7, 30, 33, 34, 36, 72, 76, 79, 81, 99, 101–5, 107–8, 112, 116, 124–6, 132–4, 150–3, 216, 228, 240–2, 245 as a Redemptive force 2, 24, 29–31, 34, 61–3, 68–9, 73–90, 114–17, 125–7, 151–4, 228–30, 243, 245–8 and the Song of Songs 18–20, 30–1, 45, 82, 178–9

274

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Eros (cont.) and Spirituality in the Middle Ages 2–3, 13–36 Exegesis 1, 19, 30, 32–3, 37–48, 50, 52, 105, 240–1 Eve 17, 74 n. 35 Fenzi, Enrico 127 n. 62, 136 n. 86, 139 n. 95, 142, 144 n. 100 Ferrante, Joan 80 n. 49, 85, 86 n. 71, 87 n. 73, 224 Ferrucci, Federico 184 n. 74 Fin’amor – see ‘courtly love’ Florence 1 n. 1, 37, 62, 75, 80 n. 48, 82, 127 n. 63, 210–11 Folco of Marseilles 3–4, 7–8, 24, 88, 168, 196–8, 205–46, 247–8 Folquet de Marselha – see Folco of Marseilles Foster, Kenelm 72, 104 n. 30, 115, 135–6 n. 86, 136 n. 89, 137 nn. 90, 91, 138–9 n. 93, 139 n. 94, 143 n. 99, 146, 148, 181, 186 n. 86, 187, 189 n. 95, 226 n. 59 Francesca da Rimini 1, 24, 63–9, 74, 86, 89, 116 n. 50, 151 n. 117, 153, 179 n. 66, 216, 227, 228, 232–3 Frati Gaudenti (religious order) 97 n. 12, 99, 222 Freccero, John 59 n. 133, 64 n. 10, 65–6, 68, 182 Frederick II 25–6, 140–1 Fulgentius 240 Giacomo da Lentini 94, 199 Gillespie, Vincent 39 Gilson, Étienne 23 n. 36 Giraut de Bornelh 4 n. 7, 7, 73, 95–6, 145–6, 153, 158–9, 162, 168, 194, 196–7, 201, 203, 213 Giunta, Claudio 27 n. 56, 42 n. 91, 73 n. 32, 94 n. 6, 100 n. 21, 134 Gorni, Guglielmo 29 n. 60, 115 n. 50 Gragnolati 71 n. 27, 80 n. 48, 82–4 Grayson, Cecil 50 Gregory the Great 17, 20 Guinizzelli, Guido 5–6, 26–30, 38, 64, 67–8, 72–4, 94 n. 6, 95, 97 n. 10, 103, 115, 123, 130 n. 71, 142, 146, 153, 180 n. 76, 185, 193–203, 231–3 Guittone d’Arezzo 3–8, 26–7, 30, 36, 42, 48, 66, 68, 73, 88–9, 93–154, 155, 181 n. 70, 191–203, 205, 207, 213, 217–23, 228, 233–4, 235, 238, 245–6, 247–8

Harrison, Robert Pogue 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 42 n. 88, 88 n. 77 Hollander, Robert 6 n. 11, 62, 64 n. 9, 229 n. 70 Holmes, Olivia 42, 72 n. 29, 74 n. 35, 75 n. 38, 85, 87 n. 73, 88 nn. 77, 78, 97 n. 13, 99, 110, 129, 131 n. 76, 135–6 Honess, Claire 222 Hugutio of Pisa 39 n. 74 Innocent III 207 Irvine, Martin 38 n. 72 Jacoff, Rachel 83, 229, 236–7 Jacopo della Lana 211 Jernigan, Charles 175, 179–80 John of Salisbury 240 Kay, Sarah 42, 160 n. 17, 162 n. 27, 169 n. 41, 170 n. 44, 173 n. 48 Kleinhenz 65–6 n. 14 Kristeva, Julia 55–7, 202 Lady Philosophy (in Dante’s Convivio) 8, 32–6, 77, 79 n. 46, 136–7, 243, 248 Lancelot and Guinevere 64, 227 Language Dante’s philosophy of 47–59 Grammar 49–57 Julia Kristeva’s understanding of 55–7 Latin 3, 37–41, 43–52, 55–8, 168, 243 Vernacular 2–6, 21, 29, 31–2, 36–8, 41–6, 47–59, 60–1, 62 n. 6, 63–5, 68, 72, 74, 79, 86 n. 71, 88–90, 93, 98, 102, 110, 127, 133, 137, 139, 141, 145–6, 151–2, 154, 159, 162, 195–6, 198–9, 201–4, 205, 223, 233–4, 246–7 Latini, Brunetto 43, 69 n. 21, 239 n. 95 Lavinia 240–1 Lazar, Moshe 22 n. 34, 23, 24–5 n. 43 Lazzerini, Laura 22 Leo, Ulrich 240 n. 99, 243, 244 n. 103 Leonardi, Lino 6 n. 10, 25 n. 44, 26 n. 51, 93 n. 1, 99–102, 108–9, 111, 121, 128, 129 n. 69 Limbo 14, 62, 224 Lombardi, Elena 14, 16 n. 8, 17 n. 12, 29 n. 58, 31 n. 63, 52 n. 112, 58 n. 132, 59, 60–1 n. 2, 63 n. 7, 69 n. 21, 71 n. 24, 80 n. 50, 85, 122, 248 Lucan 239

Index Lucretius 14 St Lucy 61–2, 85 Lust 7, 16–17, 24, 27, 31, 36, 65–70, 72–4, 76, 95, 97, 122–3, 126–7, 131–3, 147–51, 180, 198, 202–3, 209, 220, 224–33 Macabru 158, 160 n. 19, 197 n. 113 Maggini, Francesco 104 Marchesi, Simone 90 n. 81 Margueron, Claude 99–100 n. 20 Martinez, Ronald 182 n. 72, 184–5, 188 Matelda 74 n. 35 Mazzoni, Francesco 62 n. 6 Medusa 182, 187 Millspaugh, Scott 148, 192 n. 97 Minnis, Alastair 40–1, 43 n. 92 Moevs, Christian 2 n. 3, 73–4, 78, 80 n. 50, 82, 87–8 Moleta 101 n. 23, 108, 111 n. 43, 117 Monk of Montadoun 193 Montemaggi, Vittorio 90 n. 82 Mysticism 17–20, 22, 23 n. 36, 28, 30, 60, 79 n. 46, 86, 131 Nardi, Bruno 27 n. 56 Nasti, Paola 19 n. 21, 82–3 n. 55 Neoplatonism 33 n. 65, 184 Occitan poetry – see troubadour poetry Onesto da Bologna 193 n. 101 Ordiway, Frank 225 n. 55, 230 n. 72 Ovid 23, 39 n. 71, 41, 44, 73, 82 n. 55, 101, 213 n. 25, 226 n. 62, 239 Paolo and Francesca – see Francesca da Rimini ‘Pargoletta’ (in Dante’s Rime) 32 n. 64, 72 n. 31, 78 n. 42, 184 n. 74 Paris, Gaston 22 Paterson, Linda 22 n. 30, 160–2, 165, 168 n. 39, 169, 173 n. 47, 175, 177–8 St Paul 15–16, 63 n. 7 Pernicone, Vincenzo 140 n. 96, 145–6 Pertile, Lino 9 n. 13, 14 n. 3, 16 n. 8, 17 n. 12, 18 nn. 16, 17, 20 n. 24, 21 n. 27, 71, 81 n. 52, 84 n. 62, 85–6, 94 n. 5, 197–8, 225, 230 Perugi, Maurizio 157 nn. 9, 10, 164 n. 33 Picone, Michelangelo 8, 15 n. 6, 45 n. 100, 54–5, 96 n. 8, 99 n. 17, 100 n. 21, 145, 153 n. 123, 158, 168 n. 40, 96 n. 109, 197, 207, 211, 213–14, 223, 234 n. 77, 236

275

Peters, Edward 224 n. 50, 225 n. 56, 227 n. 63 Petrarch 27, 155, 163, 169, 248 Piccarda 150 n. 116, 224–5 Pilgrimage 15–16, 30, 54–5, 58 Plato 14 Plurilingualism 57, 148, 201 Poe, Elizabeth 194 n. 104 Pound, Ezra 155 n. 3, 194 ‘Praise style’ (in Dante) 114–17, 122, 183, 195 Proserpina 74 n. 35 Provençal poetry – see Troubadour poetry Psaki, Regina 4, 9 n. 13, 84 n. 62, 87–8 Pygmalion 182 Pyramus and Thisbe 73–4 Raffa, Guy 1, 69, 88 Rahab 209, 212 n. 22, 224, 228, 230 Raimbaut d’Aurenga 158–9, 197 Raimon de Durfort 193 Raimon Vidal 224 n. 49 Rea, Roberto 94–5 n. 6, 161 n. 24, 191, 197 n. 113, 202 n. 127 Renzi, Lorenzo 65–6 Reynolds, Susan 39 nn. 75, 78 Richard the Lionheart 206–7, 217 Rossi, Albert L. 213 n. 25, 216, 220–1, 226 n. 62, 227 Rossi, Luciano 183 n. 74 Rudel, Jaufré 22, 30 Ryding, Erik 177 Santagata, Marco 67 n. 18 Sapegno, Natalino 158 n. 12 Saturn 183–4 Scaglione, Aldo 24 Schnapp, Jeffrey 18 n. 19, 57 n. 129, 86 n. 71 Scholasticism 17, 38, 40, 50, 60, 70, 79 n. 46, 140–1, 144 n. 101, 153 Scott, A. Brian 40–1 n. 85 Scott, John 183–4 n. 74 Scripture – see Bible Seneca 14 Sestina 155, 160, 163, 175–82, 187–8 Shoaf, Richard 244 Sicilian poetry 25–6, 94, 107, 181 n. 70 Singleton, Charles 31, 126 Siren (in Dante’s Purgatorio) 71–2, 75 Smith, Nathaniel 197 Solomon 19, 82–4 Song of Songs 18–20, 22, 30, 31 n. 63, 44–5, 81 n. 52, 82–3, 179 Sordello 4 n. 7, 213, 224 Spitzer, Leo 42 nn. 89, 91

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Squillacioti, Paolo 208, 211 Statius 83, 234–5, 239 Steinberg, Justin 26 n. 50, 96, 152 Stewart, Dana 130 ‘Stilnovo’ – see ‘dolce stil novo’ Stocchi Perucchio, Donatella 153 Stronßski, Stanislaw 207 n. 6 Suitner, Franco 206 n. 4, 207–8, 212 n. 20, 213 n. 25, 224 n. 49, 232 n. 75 Subjectivity in Arnaut Daniel 6, 159, 161–81, 201–4 and Cultural authority 3, 36–47, 52, 98 in Dante’s Convivio 45–7, 52, 79, 235, 239, 244 of Francesca da Rimini 64, 69 in Guittone d’Arezzo 88, 131–3, 218–20 in Folco of Marseilles 88, 218–20, 235–6 and Lyric poetry 3, 41–3, 58–9, 141, 219, 245, 247 and Vernacular language 50–60, 89, 202–4, 247 Tartaro, Achille 128 n. 65 Tenzone 42 n. 88, 105, 117–22, 126, 131, 198 Terza rima 187 Toja, Gianluigi 156, 163 n. 29, 164 n. 31, 165 n. 34 Topsfield, Leslie 167, 178, 194–5 Trobar clus 7, 107, 119, 148, 157–62, 169, 175, 191–2, 196–202 Troubadour poetry Cultural origins of 21 and Early Italian poetry 24–7, 107

Nature of love in 21–4 and Religious texts 19, 22 Subjectivity in 42–3 (See also Daniel, Arnaut; Folco of Marseilles) Vasoli, Cesare 239 n. 95 Venus Goddess 74 n. 35, 224 Heaven in Dante’s Paradiso 7–8, 85, 198 n. 117, 209–14, 224–46 Planet 183 Vernacular – see Language Virgil Poet 14, 41, 64, 76, 213 n. 25, 239–45 Character in Dante’s Commedia 37, 57, 61–2, 70, 73, 79, 83, 85, 208, 226, 228, 234–5 Virgin Mary 17–18, 61, 85–6, 152, 248 Viscardi, Antonio 208 nn. 12, 13, 212 n. 22, 213 n. 25, 233 n. 76 Walker Bynum, Caroline 18 Webb, Heather 113 n. 45, 130, 182, 185, 187, 246 Wilhelm, James 160, 175, 185, 197 n. 111 Wilkins, Ernest 197 n. 113 Williams, Pamela 17 n. 11, 228–30 Yowell, Donna 170, 175, 178–9, 180 n. 68, 215 Zingarelli, Nicola 178, 207 n. 7, 208 n. 14, 213 n. 25 Zumthor, Paul 42 n. 89 Zupan, Patricia 84–5 n. 62