The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric: Scève's Délie (Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture) (Research in Medieval and Early Modern ... in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 72) 9781501517976, 9781501513596, 9781501513466, 150151797X

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of illustrations
Textual Note
Introduction
1. “Ce Poëte ayant quasi l’esprit et l’entendement de Dante”
2. Scève and fin’amor: “Jouir d’un coeur, qui est tout tien amy”
3. Scève, Ficino, Cavalcanti: “Parfeit un corps en sa parfection”
4. Scève and Dante: “Fedeli d’amore”
5. Scève and Dante: “Incessamment travaillant en moy celle”
6. Scève and Dante: “L’amor che qui raffina”
7. Scève and Petrarch: “Ardor fallace”
8. Scève and Petrarch: “Constituée idole de ma vie”
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
Index of Poems and Cantos Cited

Citation preview

Alison Baird Lovell The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture XXVI Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture LXXII

Alison Baird Lovell

The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric Scève’s Délie

ISBN 978-1-5015-1797-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1359-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1346-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939461 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Neroccio de’ Landi, Claudia Quinta, c. 1490/1495, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, © National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To my parents and to Michel Beaujour

Acknowledgments This book is the culmination of a project of long gestation and refinement. It would not have been possible without research libraries and their generous curators and staff. I would like to express my gratitude to many talented and accomplished people whose support and advice have been essential to the book’s completion. I conceived the idea many years ago while auditing James Helgeson’s graduate course on sixteenth-century French poetry, and over time he has witnessed it passer par les flammes, if I may be permitted to borrow the phrase from Scève. Michel Beaujour, my mentor, was willing to entertain my idea about Scève and Dante, reminding me with scepticism that it was not enough to speak of poetic traditions, but that “il faut la preuve”—I hope to have provided sufficient textual evidence for the case. It was a great honor to study with him, and I always miss him. Francesca Canadé Sautman indulged my determination to forge my way, and my understanding of medieval culture is indebted to her. Giuseppe Di Scipio taught me about Dante, stilnovo poetry, and the troubadours. My knowledge of Dante and Petrarch was further enhanced through study with John Freccero, who honored me by graciously reading my manuscript when I was a postdoctoral fellow. Nancy Siraisi has been a source of consistent encouragement, and is a model for scholarly and intellectual rigor. Jean-Godefroy Bidima’s confidence in me has been an inspiration, and he exemplifies intellectual inquiry and independence of thought. Thomas Hunkeler is ahead of me in my Scève inquiry, and I aspire to approach the fine quality of his work. Cécile Alduy’s elegant and thorough scholarship on Scève has been of immense help in my research. It is a pleasure to thank Robert Pogue Harrison, Ullrich Langer, Michèle Clément, Nancy Frelick, Elizabeth Beaujour, Cosima Coccheri d’Inzillo, Elias Theodoracopoulos, Wendy Nolan Joyce, Sylvie Gillard-Cohen, Vincent Martinat, Tiffany Werth, Susan Gaylard, and Barbara Szlanic. I am very grateful to my steadfast editor, Erika Gaffney, Theresa Whitaker at MIP, and Christine Henschel at De Gruyter. Most of all, I thank my parents for their longstanding support. All errors are my responsibility.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-202

Contents Acknowledgments

VII

List of Illustrations

XI

Textual Note

XIII

Introduction

1

1

“Ce Poëte ayant quasi l’esprit et l’entendement de Dante” Women, sex, and virtue 23 Early modern views of Dante and Petrarch 27 Délie’s name 31 Scève’s Lyonnais milieu 33

2

Scève and fin’amor: “Jouir d’un cœur, qui est tout tien amy” Troubadour love 51 Trobar clus 63 Union in love 65

3

Scève, Ficino, Cavalcanti: “Parfeit un corps en sa parfection” Neoplatonism as poetic influence 76 Love as devastation, love as contemplation 80 Virtue 100

4

Scève and Dante: “Fedeli d’amore” Stylistic sweetness and hardness Petrarch’s views of Dante 127

5

Scève and Dante: “Incessamment travaillant en moy celle” Prometheus 143 Inferno 5 151

6

Scève and Dante: “L’amor che qui raffina” The poet as fabbro 167 The flames of love 172 Endings 181

19

41

75

109 124

165

133

X

Contents

7

Scève and Petrarch: “Ardor fallace” Délie as un-Petrarchan 222

8

Scève and Petrarch: “Constituée idole de ma vie” Lost at sea 239

Conclusion

245

Selected Bibliography Index

251

267

Index of Poems and Cantos Cited

271

191

225

List of illustrations Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8

Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 11, Le Phenix (“De mort à vie”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, 2019 25 Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 2, La Lune a deux croiscentz (“Entre toutes une parfaicte”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, 2019 58 Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 8, La Femme qui desvuyde (“Apres long travail une fin”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, 2019 61 Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 17, L’Hyerre & la Muraille (“Pour aymer souffrir ruyne”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, 2019 62 Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 27, La vipere qui se tue (“Pour te donner vie je me donne mort”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, 2019 156 Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 13, Dido qui se brusle (“Doulce la mort qui de dueil me delivre”). Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, with all rights reserved. © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2019 173 Leonardo da Vinci, portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (recto). © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 183 Leonardo da Vinci, portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (obverse). Inscription: “Virtutem forma decorat.” © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 184

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-204

Textual Note There are no known manuscripts of Délie, so I have relied primarily upon the critical editions of Gérard Defaux (2004) and I. D. McFarlane (1966), which are based on extant copies of the first edition of 1544, printed by Sulpice Sabon for Antoine Constantin at Lyon, the facsimile of which I also consulted.1 Both critical editions include variants in the critical apparatus from the 1564 edition.2 Defaux and McFarlane address the troublesome problems of dizain numbering in these editions, punctuation, and typographical errors.3 We do not know whether Maurice Scève revised the 1564 edition, which was printed at Lyon by Nicolas du Chemin.4 As of this writing, Michèle Clément is preparing a multi-volume critical edition for Classiques Garnier of the Oeuvres complètes of Maurice Scève.5

1 Gérard Defaux, Délie, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2004); I. D. McFarlane, The Délie of Maurice Scève (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Maurice Scève, Délie, 1544, Introduction by Dudley Wilson (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1972), a facsimile of the editio princeps. 2 McFarlane, Délie, 93, and Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, pp. ccxxxix–ccl. 3 See McFarlane, Délie, 93–104. See also Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, ccxliii–ccxlviii; and Dudley Wilson’s article, “Remarks on Maurice Scève’s Délie,” Durham University Journal 29 (1967), 7–12. 4 Cécile Alduy re-edited Parturier’s 1916 edition of Délie (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2001). She wrote: “La présente édition reproduit le plus exactement possible l’édition originale, respectée jusque dans ses fautes, sauf le cas d’erreur typographique évidente.” Quoted in Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, p. ccxliii, note 3. 5 Two volumes have been published. See Maurice Scève, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome V: Microcosme, ed. Michèle Clément (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); and Oeuvres Complètes, Tome II: Arion, Blasons, Psaumes, Saulsaye (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-205

Introduction Molti amadori la lor malatia portano in core, che ’m vista nom pare Giacomo da Lentini I non mi vo’ scusar s’ i’ seguo Amore, ché gli è usanza d’ogni gentil core. Angelo Poliziano

The Délie (1544) of Maurice Scève (ca. 1501–ca. 1564) is a meditation in the form of poetry.1 This does not necessarily imply Christian religiosity or philosophical musings; rather, it is a patterned reflection on certain themes. The patterns take shape in the themes and in the poetic form: 449 decasyllabic dizains, each of which constitutes a perfect square, 10 x 10, plus one huitain. The collection is punctuated by fifty emblems, woodcuts with mottoes interspersed at regular intervals with the dizains. Thus the visual alternates with the verbal. The advent of the printing press facilitated the visual component of emblems in Délie. Scève’s meditation centers on yearning, seeking the beloved, and finding joy and suffering. Délie is the polysemic name of the lady the poet-persona adores, but she is not exclusively a conventional Petrarchan or courtly love object: instead, she radiates outward, signifying philosophical, cosmic abstractions and representing throughout the poetry an intense desire for union. She dominates the poet-lover’s universe, and he desires her without guilt. This book presents a reading of Scève’s Délie to illuminate the poetic filiation with Dante Alighieri, and offers a new perspective on the scholarly assessment of Délie as a Petrarchan lyric sequence. Petrarch and Scève are generally considered Renaissance poets, and both drew upon earlier literary resources. Poetic traditions of courtly love nourished Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Triumphi, both widely read in the Renaissance. Scève’s appropriation of certain Petrarchan motifs and language was consonant with the practice of imitatio, the use of models to participate in a

1 This sentence was composed prior to the publication of Michael Giordano’s book, The Art of Meditation and the Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010); evidently, there is common ground inherent in the observation, but my understanding of meditation differs from Giordano’s, which is grounded in Christian theology, Ignatius, and Augustine. Giordano builds a “formal theory of amatory meditation” (xv). In my reading, the amatory is essential to Scève’s poetic text, not subsumed under Christian spiritual concerns. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-001

2

Introduction

literary and intellectual tradition.2 Thomas Greene has characterized the imitation of models in the Renaissance as “a precept and an activity which during that era embraced not only literature but pedagogy, grammar, rhetoric, esthetics, the visual arts, music, historiography, politics, and philosophy.”3 Terence Cave identifies sixteenth-century literary imitatio as “the appropriation and transformation of a consecrated text.”4 While certain themes and topoi in Petrarch’s poetry constitute an important resource for Scève, the Canzoniere and Délie are also significantly different concerning poetic style, treatments of love, morality, and structure. Scholars of Scève have acknowledged the plurality of sources and traditions in Délie alongside Petrarch’s Italian lyric. For this reader, Scève’s Délie is less Petrarchan than scholarly convention sets forth, and the poetry of Petrarch’s predecessor Dante is also directly pertinent for Délie, though its influence is rather subtle; thus I have deemed it a shadow.5 The author of the Commedia occupies a prominent place in the poetic lineage preceding Petrarch, and casts a long shadow over Petrarch even more than over Scève.6 Petrarch’s preoccupation with unrequited love, memory, and writing on the inner self was elaborately developed in the Canzoniere. Yet what we recognize in Scève’s poetry in relation to Petrarch’s poetry is also found elsewhere before Petrarch. Furthermore, Délie incorporates philosophical, allegorical, and mythological motifs not found in Petrarch.7 It is reasonable to conclude that Scève appropriates for his own purposes only certain aspects of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.8 The patterned praise, desire, and suffering for the beloved woman, while highly elaborated in Petrarch’s poetry, did not originate with him.

2 For an analysis of imitation in French poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn, eds., Poétiques de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2001), chap. 6, “Les voies de l’imitation,” 415–507. See also Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), especially chap. 2, “Imitation,” 35–77; and Ann Moss, “Literary Imitation in the Sixteenth Century: Writers and Readers, Latin and French,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance, 107–18. 3 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 1. 4 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” in Pre-Pléiade Poetry (French Forum, 1985), 114. 5 The case for Petrarch’s significant influence on Scève’s Délie was made most emphatically by JoAnn DellaNeva in Song and Counter-Song: Scève’s Délie and Petrarch’s Rime (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983). 6 Michel Beaujour defined poetics as follows: “Par poétique, j’entends les principes qui justifient les arts du langage . . . ainsi que les règles qui définissent cette pratique;” De la poétologie comparative (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), 17. 7 William W. Kennedy, “The Unbound Turns of Maurice Scève,” in Creative Imitation, 67. 8 Cf. Dorothy Coleman, Doranne Fenoaltea, Terence Cave, and William W. Kennedy.

Introduction

3

Concerning textual approaches, the Dante scholar Robert Hollander has written, “[S]ource study, well handled, is probably our best single hope of penetrating the aesthetic ordering principles of literary texts: how A, B, and C all enter into X, and in what way X is like and unlike A, B, and C.”9 Yet as Jan Ziolkowski reminds us, not all similarities prove borrowing.10 Literary and artistic works are not merely an arrangement of sources and influences. While Quellenforschung can shed light on an author’s poetic, cultural, and intellectual contexts and literary genesis, source study may be insufficient, and is enhanced by coherent interpretations of the texts at hand. How different is an early modern “imitative” work from a source before we call it divergent, another literary production altogether? At what point does distinction outweigh resemblance? How can we know that an author is engaging in literary dialogue (or rivalry) with another author, rather than engaging with a tradition? These questions of literary judgment are finessed with evidence and argument, and are based in part on perception; in literary criticism, the matter retains subjectivity, subtlety, and ambiguity. A comparative approach can be useful for this purpose to distinguish conventions, modifications, and innovation. I offer in this book my interpretation of Scève’s Délie in literary relation to pertinent aspects of Dante’s oeuvre in a broad poetic context that antedates Petrarchism. The poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Scève contends with questions of erotic desire and Christian spirituality. Just as theological and spiritual content in the Commedia is complex, as evidenced by the range of views held by Dante scholars,11 so too is Scève’s spirituality as manifested in Délie complex and ambiguous,

9 Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 6. In the front matter of Allegory in Dante’s Commedia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), Hollander quotes Pascal concerning interpretation: “Deux erreurs: 1, prendre tout littéralement; 2, prendre tout spirituellement” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragment Loi figurative 8/31. See www.pen seesdepascal.fr/Loi/Loi8-savante.php). Pascal’s caveats are apt for the present study. 10 Jan Ziolkowski, Dante and Islam, 11. 11 The complex theological, religious, and metaphysical thought in Dante’s poetry has given rise to abundant scholarship: see, e.g., John Freccero, who considered theological matters to be integral to Dante; his books include Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and In Dante’s Wake (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015); Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2005); Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Bruno Nardi, Saggi e note di critica dantesca (Milan: Ricciardi, 1966); Étienne Gilson, Dante et la philosophie (2nd ed., Paris: Vrin, 1953), esp. 3–18 and 114–22; Gilson, Dante et Béatrice, études dantesques (Paris: Vrin, 1974), esp. 79–102; and Enciclopedia Dantesca (Rome: Treccani, 1970): articles such as “Teologia” by Kenelm Foster; “Filosofia” by Vincenzo Placella; “Spirito” by Paolo Mugnai; “Trinità” by Giovanni Fallani; and “Anima” by Efrem Bettoni. Gilson discusses the argument set forth by Pierre Mandonnet in Dante le théologien

4

Introduction

and pertinent motifs are not necessarily relegated neatly to the rubric of Christian religiosity. Eros, incorporating passionate personal love, is not always sublimated to become agape. The way Petrarch handles Christian motifs and erotic themes in his poetry is distinct from Scève in Délie. Délie is syncretic and incorporates many sources through imitation and allusion, yet it is also original. Cynthia Skenazi comments: On assiste chez Scève comme chez d’autres écrivains de son temps . . . à une superposition de discours qui, plusieurs siècles plus tard, nous paraissent difficilement compatibles. On tenterait en vain de réconcilier des perspectives mutuellement exclusives ou d’attribuer à l’auteur une position tranchée: un tel choix risquerait de simplifier et de fausser la signification de l’ouvrage. Tout l’intérêt de la Délie réside précisément dans le syncrétisme parfois déconcertant d’éléments issus de traditions diverses.12

How can a reader reconcile diverse currents of Neoplatonism with Petrarchism, with rhétoriqueurs, with evangelistic readings, or with pagan Roman sources, all of which can coexist in Scève’s Délie? With caveats in mind, I have sought to demonstrate how the writings of Dante contribute directly to the poetic threads with which Scève wove his dizain sequence. Dante’s writings constitute part of the tapestry of Scevian sources, along with those of Petrarch, who was himself profoundly influenced by Dante, as scholarship has affirmed.13 The Occitan troubadours preceded these poets, and established poetic discourses on love. Given the presence of Dante and others in the poetic and intellectual background, Scève’s dizain sequence may not be as Petrarchan as it seems. Terence Cave likens allusiveness to the medieval tradition of moral commentary and glossing, and finds that Scève’s Petrarchan references produce meaning different from that generated by Petrarch’s lyric, in the allusions to the Canzoniere and Triumphi that Scève exploits in Délie.14 These references in Délie become Petrarchan topoi placed in a new context and given a distinct sense in Scève’s dizains. Cave views Scève’s imitation of Petrarch as being consistent with his time.15 Jacqueline Risset calls Scève’s practice a “pétrarquisme citationnel.”16 Scève’s imitation of Petrarch’s poetry may be considered heuristic, meaning it

(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1935), who posited three Dames in Dante’s Vita nuova: Beatrice, Poetry, and Philosophy; two in the Convivio: Beatrice and Philosophy; and only one in the Commedia: Beatrice. See Gilson, Dante et la philosophie, 4–9. 12 Cynthia Skenazi, Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne, 10. 13 See Zygmunt G. Baranski and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., eds., Petrarch and Dante: AntiDantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 14 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 112–24. 15 Cave, “Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 114. 16 Risset, Anagramme, esp. 21–38, cited in Cave, “Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 123, note 5.

Introduction

5

contains subtexts, but also distances itself from those subtexts, thereby compelling the reader to recognize the distance between the two texts.17 Jerry C. Nash notes that one of the un-Petrarchan aspects of Scève’s poetry was its sensuality.18 Petrarch and Scève were love poets in the context of traditions of fin’amor and courtly love, which furnished motivations and modes to compose amatory poetry. While fin’amor implies medieval Occitan troubadours, courtly love is a more flexible term, modern in origin, but referring to medieval developments in lyric and narrative, explored in such works as De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love) of Andreas Capellanus, the romans of Chrétien de Troyes, and the Roman de la rose. Other amatory topoi are not peculiar to courtly love: the lover’s anxiety about pleasing the beloved, and seeing or spending time with the beloved; the beloved’s inaccessibility or disdain; the need for secrecy and intrigue; and love personified as a supernatural creature, deity, or grand seigneur. Roman love poetry, in contrast to medieval courtly love, did not tend to elevate the beloved or consider love an ennobling force. The postclassical literary convention of the poet-persona addressing a real or imaginary lady evolved across several centuries in premodern and early modern Europe as an essential underpinning of love lyric, even when courtly themes were employed in a distorted or satirical manner.19 Petrarch’s conception of love in the Canzoniere diverges from the principle of love exalting the lover who seeks transcendence and potential union with the beloved. Dante and Scève adhere to this principle, when the lover finds the true way: “la verace via” (Inf. 1.12). Petrarch’s love for Laura is sinful and forbidden for theological reasons, as distinct from Dante’s love for Beatrice and Scève’s love for Délie, not forbidden by Christian morality according to the poetry. Petrarch expresses guilt and finally renounces Laura at the conclusion of his lyric cycle (Rvf 366). Michel Beaujour writes that while the medieval miroir encyclopédique leads one to model oneself on Christ, to choose the good: “[il] encode une ambivalence, et la nécessité d’un choix: il évoque le risque inhérent à toute destinée humaine orientée vers le salut.”20 The moral choice can lead to downfall, as Dante demonstrates in the Inferno. Petrarch’s poetic persona confronts this question differently from Dante the pilgrim, with a different outcome.

17 See Greene, Light in Troy, 40. 18 Jerry C. Nash, “Desires in Délie: A Study in Hermeneutics,” in A Scève Celebration, Délie 1544–1994, pp. 164–71. 19 E.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets flouted conventional treatments of love, and Du Bellay’s satirical poem “Contre les petrarquistes” (“À une Dame,” Recueil de Poesie, XVIII, 1553) inveighed against Petrarchist poets. 20 Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, rhétorique de l’autoportrait, 35.

6

Introduction

The act of reading about love involves desire in that its evocation through a text can inspire amorous passion, as Peter Abelard (1079–1142) stated in his autobiographical Historia calamitatum, when he and Héloïse experienced erotic desire while reading books.21 Dante portrayed such a scenario in the fifth canto of Inferno with Paolo and Francesca, and Giovanni Boccaccio evoked it in the Decameron prologue, as well as in the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta.22 Desire may ensue from poetry’s meaning, in that desire arises through the act of reading, via abstraction and imagination, bringing about responses in the reader/ listener. John Freccero comments on Inferno 5: “Eros and poetry are inseparable on a journey that strains both to their limit.”23 The persistent connection between poetry and desire resonates in the present book. The relevance of Petrarch’s Canzoniere for Scève’s Délie is undeniable.24 Petrarch is an important poetic source for Scève, and Délie has been called the 21 Abelard, Historia calamitatum: “Sub occasione itaque discipline amori penitus vaccabamus, et secretos regressus, quos amor optabat, studium lectionis offerebat. Apertis itaque libris plura de amore quam de lectione verba se ingerebant, plura erant oscula quam sententie, sepius ad sinus quam ad libros reducebantur manus, crebrius oculos amor in se reflectebat quam lectio in scripturam dirigebat” (Under the pretext of study, we abandoned ourselves entirely to love, and our lessons gave us the privacy our love required. Although our books were open, we spoke more of love than of learning. There were more kisses than conferences. Our hands went more often to one another’s breasts than to our texts: §304–9). Abelard also alludes to the medieval gradus amoris (§313). Books and erotic love were intertwined in the relations of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard’s Latin text: Troyes, MS 802, ed. Alexander Andrée (University of Toronto Press, 2015); English trans. by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler, in The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of their Collected Correspondence and Related Writings, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 24. 22 Concerning Fiammetta, the book’s protagonist-narrator purports to address female readers, the book being a warning against the allures of love (see prologue): Boccaccio portrays an adulterous, obsessive passion in Fiammetta’s narrative. Some scholars have likened Boccaccio’s Fiammetta to an inverse Vita nuova (e.g., Singleton). Scève translated La Deplourable fin de Flamete (1535) from the late fifteenth-century Spanish roman of Juan de Flores, a sequel to Boccaccio’s Fiammetta. 23 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 194. Elsewhere, Freccero writes: “In Dante, the theme of his love is inseparable from his poetry.” See “In the Wake of the Argo on a Boundless Sea,” in In Dante’s Wake, 119. 24 Cécile Alduy has cogently summarized the matter in “Scève et Pétrarque: La mise à distance d’un héritage,” in Maurice Scève ou l’emblème de la perfection enchevêtrée. Délie objet de plus haute vertu (1544) (Paris: PUF, 2012), 41–59. See also Alduy’s essay, “Scève et Pétrarque: “De mort à vie,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, ed. Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 157–70. JoAnn DellaNeva in Song and Counter-Song: Scève’s Délie and Petrarch’s Rime (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983), Doranne Fenoaltea in articles (1972 and 1975), and Stephan Minta, Love Poetry in Sixteenth-Century France (1977) have addressed the topic. I. D. McFarlane succinctly covered the echoes of Petrarch and Petrarchist poets,

Introduction

7

first Petrarchan collection of lyric poems to appear in French.25 The poetic legacy of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Triumphi is too vast to chronicle here, but as Robert Durling has observed, it extends beyond the vogue for sonnets, conceits, and wordplay that commonly identify it.26 Freccero has written, “The poems of the Canzoniere seem to be crystallizations of previously invented verse forms: the sonnet, the sestina, the Dantesque canzone. In content, they are equally familiar, not to say banal, for they elaborate with spectacular variations on a tired theme of courtly love: the idolatrous and unrequited passion for a beautiful and sometimes cruel lady.”27 Gordon Braden sums up the tradition of Petrarchism as the “desire for someone you cannot have.”28 Petrarch’s conception of the lover as sinner in a work of literary self-creation is modeled on Augustine’s Confessions, Petrarch’s favorite book.29 Petrarch’s Canzoniere is composed of 366 vernacular lyric poems, of which 317 are sonnets.30 The Olive

including lists of pertinent Scevian dizains, in the introduction to Délie (1966). Gérard Defaux discusses Petrarch’s relevance for Scève in his introduction to Délie (2004). 25 Bruno Roger-Vasselin refers to Délie as “ce premier canzoniere de la Renaissance française” in Maurice Scève ou l’emblème de la perfection enchevêtrée, 11. On Petrarch’s importance, Nathalie Dauvois writes in Maurice Scève, Délie (2012): “Scève puise, comme Du Bellay, à larges mains, chez Pétrarque et ses imitateurs. Cependant, le modèle source est essentiel pour Délie, davantage peut-être que pour L’Olive . . . Scève est peut-être en effet plus fidèle à Pétrarque que les pétrarquistes, il ne lui emprunte pas seulement un modèle de recueil et une stylistique, mais bien une conception du monde et du moi” (65). Dauvois declares that Petrarch’s dissidio (internal tension that produces ambiguity stemming from the poet’s forbidden desire for Laura) applies also to Scève in Délie (65). In recent scholarship in English, Ullrich Langer has called Scève’s Délie a “true canzoniere” (Lyric in the Renaissance: Petrarch to Montaigne, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 151, and cf. 18), and interprets the Scevian verses “Comme de tous la delectation, / Et de moy seul fatale Pandora” (D 2.9–10), and indeed the entire dizain, as a “commentary on that Petrarchan oxymoron of sweet suffering” (152). These statements by esteemed experts articulate a standard view that is consequential in Scève criticism. In his critical edition, Defaux remarks, “Encore et toujours Pétrarque” (Délie, vol. 2, note to emblem 13, p. 151). A different perspective has been set forth in the present book. 26 Robert Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), vii. 27 John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” (Diacritics, 1975), reproduced in In Dante’s Wake, 137. 28 Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, xiii. Braden’s point would not pertain to the Roman elegists, nor to all medieval lyric. 29 John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel,” 138. 30 Petrarch’s collection of “scattered rhymes” is known as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or Rime sparse (from the initial verse in the collection, “Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono”), or Cose vulgari, or Sonetti e canzoni, titles emphasizing attributes of incompleteness, fragmentation, and disunity. I follow custom in referring to his lyric sequence as the Canzoniere (a designation dating from the fifteenth century), and citations of individual poems are identified with Rvf, from the Latin title. The Italian terms canzoniere (songbook) and rime (rhymes,

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(1549, 1550) of Joachim Du Bellay is the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in French (following Petrarch’s choice of the sonnet form for most poems comprising the Canzoniere); by 1550, the Olive sequence was augmented from fifty to 115 sonnets. Scève’s Délie is a sequence of dizains, not sonnets.31 Scève also composed sonnets in French subsequent to Marot, and prior to Du Bellay and Ronsard. Two main currents of Scève criticism developed concerning poetic predecessors: one emphasized the French rhétoriqueur tradition, and the other encompassed the Italian lyric tradition, including Petrarch as well as Petrarchists (for example, Chariteo or Serafino). The present analysis of Délie incorporates material including Occitan lyric alongside French and Italian lyric traditions as poetic background for Scève’s dizain sequence.32 Dante’s rime petrose, Vita nuova, and Commedia furnished material that Petrarch used in composing his Canzoniere and Triumphi. Petrarch rarely mentioned his illustrious predecessor by name in his writing, but numerous echoes of Dante are found in Petrarch’s verses, as Aldo Bernardo, Marco Santagata, Sara Sturm-Maddox, and many others have shown. In his comprehensive survey Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (1995), Martin McLaughlin demonstrates Dante’s literary relevance by devoting his first chapter to Dante, and the second to Petrarch.33 When Scève read the Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, he was reading poetry manifesting the profound influence of Dante, particularly his Vita nuova, Rime, and Commedia.34 Scève’s Délie imitated the vernacular poetry of Petrarch and Dante, who shared a common heritage. My purpose is to nuance the assessment of Petrarchan aspects and to clarify the matter of Italian poetic sources in Délie. To this end, I will examine passages in the Vita nuova, Rime, Commedia, and, briefly, De vulgari eloquentia. My intent is to demonstrate how the shadow of Dante emerges in Délie. Scève’s references are stripped of the

poems) can refer to works of various Duecento and Trecento Italian poets, including Dante and Cavalcanti. 31 Concerning the sonnet, epigram, and dizain in the first half of the sixteenth century, see François Rigolot, “Le sonnet et l’épigramme, ou: L’enjeu de la ‘superscription,’” in Pre-Pléiade Poetry, 97–111. 32 Gérard Defaux alludes to Occitan troubadours as plausibly being among Scève’s poetic sources, and cites Jacqueline Risset (1971, 45–48, on melhuramen) in support; see Délie, vol. 1, xvi–xviii and note 8 on p. xvi. 33 McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 34 Besides the criticism of scholars such as Sara Sturm-Maddox and Marco Santagata, Paolo Trovato in Dante in Petrarca: Per un inventario dei dantismi nei Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Florence: Olschki, 1979) catalogues specific phrases and borrowings from Dante. See also Robert Durling’s introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (1976).

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hierarchical structures of Dante in the tripartite Commedia, so that we find purgatory juxtaposed with death, blessedness in hell, and pain in heaven, rather than a journey recounted within a meticulously ordered structure. This is Scève’s way of expressing paradoxical love experiences in his poetry, in which categories are mingled and emotions fluctuate. It is comparable to the classical treatment of bittersweet love, love being the domain of Eros, who sows a type of madness in the lover’s heart.35 Parallels also emerge with the Occitan troubadours who made use of paradox and antithesis. Scève’s appropriation of the Petrarchan model does in fact incorporate a long tradition that precedes Petrarch. We cannot be absolutely certain what Scève read and appreciated, but compelling evidence exists that he read Dante’s poetry. It is plausible that Scève was acquainted with troubadour verse and Italian lyric preceding Petrarch, including references from the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. In my view, the case for Petrarch’s poetic influence on Scève warrants the following nuance: while Petrarch was pre-eminent as a model for sixteenth-century vernacular love lyric, his poetry incorporated other sources available to Scève, including poets whom Scève read directly. Petrarch’s Canzoniere was not the overwhelmingly dominant, closely or consistently imitated model for Scève. Terence Cave has written, “Unlike Du Bellay and Ronsard, Scève did not pillage the Canzoniere for themes, figures of speech and turns of phrase at the rhetorical level.”36 I argue that Dante also exerted a direct influence on Scève, and we shall see how parallels in their poetry do not correspond to Petrarch’s lyric. Significant contrasts emerge between Petrarch and Dante when they write about love, distinctions ranging from language to religious connotations of the beloved lady. Scève employed a variety of poetic and rhetorical devices with conscious deliberation, and scholarship has acknowledged that he was not imitating Petrarch exclusively. The first chapter of this book, “Ce Poëte ayant quasi l’esprit et l’entendement de Dante,” presents pertinent aspects of Scève’s biography and milieu in Lyon, with its intellectual developments and Italianate culture; unlike Paris, Lyon had no university imposing scholastic authority in the 1530s and 1540s. In 1547, the 35 For a brief summary of the function and purview of Eros for the ancient Greeks (subsequently appropriated and adapted by the Romans as Cupid or Amor), see the article “Eros” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Plato’s Symposium contains a series of speeches defining Eros, including Socrates’s speech ostensibly originating with Diotima. For a book-length treatment of the deity, with transmission of ancient conceptions of Eros to later periods including the Renaissance, see Bruce S. Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, HarperCollins, 1997). See also Thomas Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986) and Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 36 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” in Pre-Pléiade Poetry, 116.

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Introduction

Lyonnais printer Jean de Tournes dedicated his edition of Dante’s Commedia to Scève, praising him in the preface. The quote referring to Scève as having “l’entendement de Dante” is from Charles Fontaine (Lyon, 1577). Chapter 2, Scève and fin’amor: “Jouir d’un cœur, qui est tout tien amy,” discusses the union between the poet and his beloved in fin’amor, the troubadours whom Dante admired and their relevance for Scève, the treatise De arte honeste amandi of Andreas Capellanus, and the Roman de la rose. The troubadour style trobar clus corresponds to Scève’s penchant for composing obscure poetry; Délie adheres to conventions of courtly love. A complex web of filiations connects the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. In chapter 3, Scève, Ficino, Cavalcanti: “Parfeit un corps en sa parfection,” I examine the poetic influence of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s friend and rival, on Marsilio Ficino’s treatise De amore (Commentarium in Convivium Platonis), the commentary on Plato’s Symposium whose Neoplatonist ideas influenced Scève and others in sixteenth-century France. In De amore, Ficino distorted certain ideas of Cavalcanti concerning definitions of love. In Florence, Ficino was a pupil of Cristoforo Landino, a grand lecteur of Dante and Petrarch who composed a Platonizing commentary on Dante’s Commedia. The literary and intellectual background having been established, chapter 4, Scève and Dante: “Fedeli d’amore,” develops a comparative reading of Scève’s Délie with Dante’s canzoni known as the rime petrose (stony rhymes), drawing thematic parallels concerning attributes of hardness, and with the Vita nuova, including Dante’s strange dream vision in which Love compels Beatrice to eat Dante’s flaming heart. Dante’s treatise De vulgari eloquentia is germane to Délie concerning vernacular poetics. Chapter 5, Scève and Dante: “l’amor che qui raffina,” continues the comparative analysis of Délie with textual evidence in Dante’s Commedia, including the episode of Paolo and Francesca from Inferno 5 and parameters for love and lust. Chapter 6, Scève and Dante: “Incessamment travaillant en moy celle,” demonstrates how Délie shares common ground with Dante’s poetry concerning conceptions of love and the handling of motifs of death, virtue, and literary purification by fire. Pietro Bembo’s judgment in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525)37 preferred Petrarch to Dante as the model for Italian poetry, and this contributed to the preference for Petrarch’s vernacular verses over Dante’s. Chapter 7, Scève and Petrarch: “Ardor fallace,” examines the poetic relation between Scève and Petrarch through textual evidence and criticism. Scève’s dizain sequence is interpreted here as being less Petrarchan than scholarly convention holds, and differences between the Canzoniere and Délie are significant

37 Bembo dates the composition of Prose della volgar lingua to 1503; it was published in 1525, the second edition in 1538, and third edition (posthumous), 1548.

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concerning poetic style and morality. While scholarship on Scève’s Délie has acknowledged poetic background beyond Petrarch, Petrarch’s importance for Délie merits review. Chapter 8, Scève and Petrarch: “Constituée idole de ma vie,” demonstrates how Petrarch’s ambivalence about his forbidden desire for Laura and his use of imagery are distinct from both Scève and Dante respectively in terms of devotion to the beloved. Affinities between Scève and Dante do not accord with Petrarch, and I posit a direct filiation between them. In some ways, Petrarch’s Laura contrasts with Délie, and there are intriguing parallels with Dante’s Beatrice and Délie. Whereas Dante and Scève seek transcendence and synthesis, Petrarch ultimately renounces his love for Laura, who is linked inextricably with his own poetic vanity and ambition; Petrarch’s love for Laura endangers his salvation. For Dante, the journey to Beatrice is consubstantial with the journey to God, and the two quests are integrated. Dante’s influence is a subtle yet essential component of Scève’s poetic heritage, characterized here as shadow. Petrarch was profoundly influenced by Dante, and sought to resist that influence; Scève draws upon both Dante and Petrarch, alluding to “ce Thuscan Apollo” (D 417.6), and yet diverging from Petrarch in ways that undermine the work’s identification as substantially Petrarchan. Scève’s Délie was not widely mentioned in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century; Sainte-Beuve alludes to Scève in his Tableau historique et critique de la poésie et du théâtre français du XVIe siècle (1828). In 1916, Eugène Parturier published the first modern critical edition of Délie, with notes attributing many borrowings from Petrarch and the Petrarchist poets, such that the reader might conclude that Scève was a mere plagiarist. Parturier wrote, “La Délie est le plus obscur de tous les recueils pétrarquistes. On chercherait en vain, même en Italie, une poésie plus énigmatique, sauf peut-être quelques pièces particulièrement artificielles de Dante et de Pétrarque.”38 Parturier referred to Dante and Petrarch together to show that, like those Tuscans, when Scève alluded to events, he indicated when his poems were composed.39 French critics such as Henri Weber later countered the theory of Italian imitation by emphasizing the native French poetic tradition for Scève, particularly the rhétoriqueurs. During a discussion of Leone Ebreo’s dialogues, Verdun-Louis Saulnier comments on Scève’s judicious use of Petrarch’s poetry as a resource: Est-ce à dire que Scève, “pétrarquiste” tant qu’il souffre, se soit contenté de coiffer son développement pétrarquiste d’un couronnement platoniste, à la mode française d’environ 1540? Non. Pas plus que son “pétrarquisme” n’est pur ni servile–et il en sera reparlé à

38 Parturier, Délie, xiii. Quoted also in Minta, 39. 39 Parturier, Délie, x.

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Introduction

propos des sources textuelles–son achèvement en amour pur n’est d’obédience platoniste. Ici et là, il s’inspire de modes, mais sans servage.40

Franco Simone’s article (1968) examined the presence of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the sixteenth-century Lyon of Scève’s time, and his book, The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France (in Italian 1961, revised English edition 1969), contributed to the subject, given Simone’s mastery of Italian literature including Dante and Petrarch.41 The essays in Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (2009) advance our understanding of how Petrarch is situated within Trecento anti-Dantism (for example, Cecco d’Ascoli’s polemic), and how Petrarch responded to his illustrious poetic predecessor: Theodore J. Cachey has characterized it as “Petrarch’s deep ideological dissent from Dante” and intent to undermine Dante’s auctoritas.42 Aldo Bernardo’s article “Petrarch’s Attitude toward Dante” (1955) had laid groundwork, followed by Natalino Sapegno (1963) and Giuseppe Billanovich (1965). In Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (1984), Teodolinda Barolini examined Dante’s reception of earlier poets including troubadours. In “Petrarch as a Poet of Provence” (2004), William D. Paden situates Petrarch within fourteenth-century Occitan poetic, geographical, and political contexts. Jacqueline Risset has published work on both Scève and Dante, and has translated Dante’s Commedia into French.43 Risset commences L’anagramme du désir by distinguishing Scève’s dense style from the respective langages of Dante and Petrarch: Scève’s poetry “semble toujours sur le point d’atteindre sa conclusion, de révéler son secret, mais . . . renvoie toujours au-delà.”44 Risset goes on to compare l’usage scévien to that of Dante: “l’opacité suscitée par les noms chez Scève n’est pas seulement l’effet de l’excès des connotations qui dispersent l’identité, mais signifie aussi, comme chez Dante, l’ancrage à une réalité qui renvoie à l’‘hors-texte’, au ‘monde’, dans lequel sont compris l’éphémère et la contingence.”45 Risset observes that Scève is close to Dante and the stilnovo poets in their

40 Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Maurice Scève, vol. 1, p. 249. 41 Franco Simone, “La presenza di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio nel primo umanesimo lionese,” in Umanesimo, Rinascimento, Barocco in Francia (Milan: Mursia, 1968) pp. 59–74, and The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, trans. H. Gaston Hall (London: Macmillan, 1969). 42 Cachey, “Between Petrarch and Dante,” in Petrarch and Dante, 4 sq. 43 See Risset, Dante écrivain, ou l’intelletto d’amore (Paris: Seuil, 1982), Dante: Une Vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), and L’anagramme du désir. Risset translated Dante’s Commedia: see La Divine Comédie, 3 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1985–1990). 44 Risset, Anagramme, 11. 45 Risset, Anagramme, 22.

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inquiry into love “selon l’angle le plus vaste, le plus cosmique.”46 This is not the case for the Petrarchist poets, as Risset points out. She compares Scève’s taste for devises with that of the troubadours. Georges Poulet (1967) cited six verses from Microcosme to demonstrate how Scève could surpass Ronsard, Racine, Hugo, and Baudelaire in sublime poetic expression, adding: “Seul Dante, au plus haut, au plus profond de lui-même, a trouvé des accents d’une telle altitude.”47 I. D. McFarlane (in his critical edition of Délie, 1966) and Dorothy Coleman (in Maurice Scève, Poet of Love: Tradition and Originality, 1975) expressed scepticism concerning the degree of Scève’s Petrarchism; this corresponds to my reading of Délie. In Love Poetry in Sixteenth Century France (1977), Stephen Minta covers territory similar to that discussed in this book. Minta briefly traces the development of love lyric from troubadours to Petrarch and to French Petrarchism, leading to the poetry of Marot and Scève. He discusses how the Pléiade deviates from medieval courtly poetry, which displays continuity through Guillaume de Machaut, Charles d’Orléans, Marot, and Scève. Minta acknowledges the complex maze of themes and influences that are difficult to isolate.48 He emphasizes that the reader “should be alive to the nuances of the courtly tradition,”49 and allies himself with Marcel Françon against Parturier in being cautious about labeling French poets like Marot as “Petrarchan.”50 He writes, “The problems surrounding the use of the term Petrarchism derive, then, from the fact that many of the themes and devices adduced as Petrarchan have a well-assimilated position in French poetry at least as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century.”51 JoAnn DellaNeva’s book, Song and Counter-Song: Scève’s ‘Délie’ and Petrarch’s ‘Rime’ (1983), interpreted Délie as a noncomic parody (from the Greek parodia, a song sung beside) in relation to Petrarch’s Canzoniere. DellaNeva argued that Scève established a countergenre, examining the Apollo-Daphne myth and each work’s structure. DellaNeva considered the Canzoniere a “sacred” model, which rendered Scève’s reading of it a scriptural exegesis. My interpretation differs from DellaNeva’s in the extent and scope of Scève’s imitation of Petrarch as the major poetic source and model (see in this regard chapter 7). In The Love Aesthetics of 46 Risset, Anagramme, 40. 47 Georges Poulet, “La poésie de Maurice Scève,” Nouvelle Revue Française, 15:1, no. 169 (January 1967), 84–96. The lines begin: “Essence pleine en soy, d’infinité latente . . . ” (see Scève, Microcosme 1.17–22). Poulet’s essay on Scève was reprinted as the first chapter of Mesure de l’instant, vol. 4 of Études sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1968), 15–31. Poulet, like Risset, has written on both Scève and Dante. 48 Stephen Minta, Love Poetry in Sixteenth Century France, 1. 49 Minta, Love Poetry, 23. 50 Minta, Love Poetry, 26. 51 Minta, Love Poetry, 29–30.

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Introduction

Maurice Scève (1991), Jerry C. Nash emphasized the ineffable and transcendent in Scève’s poetry, which he qualified as “paradisal.” Nash briefly discussed Dante, and his perspective finds affinity with comparisons developed here.52 In Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne (1992), Cynthia Skenazi presented a Pauline and spiritual reading of Délie, and posited a conversion, whereas my analysis pursues other questions. In Harmonie divine et subjectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (2001), James Helgeson discusses poetry in relation to music and concordia discors, arguing from a more pessimistic stance against the interpretation of ultimate resolution in Délie; the concept of celestial harmony is pertinent in reference to Dante. In Le vif du sens: corps et poésie selon Maurice Scève (2003), Thomas Hunkeler explores the Ficinian spiriti and develops points about the dolce stil novo and Petrarch’s literary relation to Scève via conceptions of the body. For Hunkeler, Scève situates Petrarch among the ancients, placing distance between them as ancient versus modern, les morts versus les vivants; Scève avoids the epithet of Petrarchist.53 Cécile Alduy’s essay, “Scève et Pétrarque: de mort à vie,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque (2004), lays out comparative points concerning the two poets, including a discussion of memory and Petrarch’s opening sonnet of the Canzoniere. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani’s article, “Échos de Dante dans la poésie française du XVIe siècle” (2004), touches very briefly on Dante and Scève. Michael Giordano’s book, The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) (2010), mentions Dante in passing, but devotes much space to Petrarch, Augustine, and the Christian meditative tradition in relation to Scève. Michèle Clément has examined the literary relations of Scève and Dante in her essay, “Scève, Dante et la valeur féminine dans Délie” (2016), drawing a parallel between Délie and Beatrice in terms of the poetic valorization of women; she acknowledges the limits of interpreting Délie as being pétrarquien.54 My work has benefited from the aforementioned scholarship and from other work. Scholars have developed diverse readings of Scève’s poetry that do not necessarily concur. While there has been consideration in scholarship of

52 Nash notes that Dante, Petrarch and Scève evoke a vision of beauty, perfection and light with the beloved that transports the poet to an exalted state (Love Aesthetics, 133–136). 53 Thus Scève can resurrect Petrarch archeologically as with other figures from antiquity, for instance with his 1533 “discovery” of Laura’s tomb. See Hunkeler, Le vif du sens. Corps et poésie chez Maurice Scève (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 40–41 and 55–56. 54 Clément’s article is in L’unique change de scène. Écritures spirituelles et discours amoureux (XIIe–XVIIe siècle), ed. Véronique Ferrer, Barbara Marczuk, and Jean-René Valette (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), 231–46.

Introduction

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Dante as a poetic predecessor of Scève in Délie, a sustained comparative study is warranted. For our purpose the poetry of Dante and the troubadours is considered medieval, whereas Petrarch joins the early Renaissance rubric; still, evolution coexists with continuity, and significant characteristics of Petrarch’s Canzoniere have origins in medieval lyric poetry.55 Aspects of Scève’s pre-Pléiade, vernacular lyric have medieval roots constituting a renewal from origins closer geographically and chronologically to Scève than those stemming from ancient Greece or Rome. Concerning the terms “medieval” and “renaissance” that previous scholars have bequeathed to us, I use them by custom and convenience, while excluding a progressivist hierarchy of historical periods. If we consider the death implicated in a “rebirth” (re-naissance), it referred to the slow decay of classical civilization that was investigated and renewed during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.56 Between the twelfth and sixteenth century, thinkers, writers, artisans, and artists sought cultural and intellectual resources beyond those stemming from western Christian traditions, including extant texts and arts of classical civilization. My purpose here is not to spar in the ring of premodern, early modern, medieval, and Renaissance polemics concerning historical and cultural definitions, but to identify poetic influence through textual evidence, with consideration of cultural and intellectual contexts.57 Concerning poetry, while there are indeed characteristics, genres, and forms that distinguish medieval from Renaissance verse, the

55 See the introduction to Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996). See also John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics” (Diacritics, 1975), reprinted in In Dante’s Wake, 137–50; Robert Durling’s introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (1976); Teodolinda Barolini, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta),” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (2009), 33–62; Leonard Forster, The Icy fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1–60; Stephen Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 1–23; Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), especially chapters 1–2. See also The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, part 2, pp. 39–84, and William J. Kennedy, “Petrarchan Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance, 119–26. 56 See Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11: “For if there had been a rebirth there must also have been a death, in this case the death of the classical civilization which is today held to be so central to European culture.” 57 The literature is vast on early modern and Renaissance debates and periodizations, and spans several academic disciplines; see, e.g., William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Renaissance Historiography (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); Hiram Haydn, The

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Introduction

boundaries of those categories are fluid and relative, contingent on the individual writers employing them; there is also poetic continuity.58 To illustrate the chronological inconsistencies across linguistic and geographical terrain: Christine de Pizan (born ca. 1364 on the Italian peninsula), François Villon, and Charles d’Orléans, as well as Chaucer, were writing after Petrarch’s death, yet the aforementioned have been classified as late medieval poets, whereas Petrarch is generally viewed as an early Renaissance poet.59 Michèle Clément has critiqued a certain view of the Renaissance as turning away from

Counter-Renaissance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950); and Jean Delumeau, La civilisation de la Renaissance (Paris: Arthaud, 1967). Idealized conceptions of the Renaissance, with western Europe at the summit of cultural achievement and civilization, were largely constructed in the nineteenth-century writings of Jules Michelet (with sixteenth-century France at the center), Jakob Burckhardt (focusing on Italy), and Walter Pater in anglophone scholarship. In 1919, Johan Huizinga challenged prevailing views of the Renaissance in The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen; formerly translated into English as “waning”). Jerry Brotton remarks, “The idea of the Renaissance is an elite concept, based on the cultural ideals of a very small stratum of society,” The Renaissance Bazaar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6. A refreshing mise en question of the entrenched notion of a “medieval” epoch was set forth by Jacques Heers in Le moyen âge, une imposture (Paris: Perrin “Tempus,” 1992). It is necessary to examine assumptions about conventional periodization categories. 58 The earliest extant sonnets ostensibly originated in Sicily in the early thirteenth century, and the sonnet’s structure and rhyme scheme varied according to language, place, and time, but became established as fourteen lines; the sonnet after Petrarch became the “Renaissance” lyric form par excellence. In France, “medieval” forms were considered passé by the midsixteenth century, dismissed by Joachim Du Bellay in his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) as “ces vieilles Poësies Françoyses,” including “Rondeaux, Ballades, Vyrelaiz, Chantz royaulx, Chansons et autres telles episseries, qui corrumpent le goust de nostre Langue: et ne servent si non à porter temoingnaige de notre ignorance” (2.4), in contrast to Sébillet’s favorable view of medieval forms in his treatise Art poétique françois (1548). Du Bellay, who borrows liberally from the Dialogo delle lingue of Sperone Speroni (Venice, 1542), exhorts French poets to look to Petrarch’s sonnets as a model (2.4). See Joachim Du Bellay, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), a critical edition that includes Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue with the French translation of Claude Gruget (Paris, 1551) on facing pages. Marot, a prolific Renaissance poet and transitional figure who both transcends and concludes the rhétoriqueur movement, influences Scève. Marot’s poetic production encompassed an astonishing range of genres: ballade, chant royal, épigramme, chanson, rondeau, sonnet, élégie, satire, églogue, épître, as well as translations of Psalms and classical Latin verse (including Vergil and Ovid) into French. See the preface to Simonin and Defaux, eds., Clément Marot “Prince des Poëtes François” 1496–1544 (Paris: Champion, 1996), 17. Marot’s native language was not French but Occitan. 59 For a polemical critique of the boundaries of the medieval and Renaissance periods, see Jacques Heers, Le Moyen âge, une imposture (Paris: Perrin “Tempus,” 1992), especially part 1, pp. 25–124.

Introduction

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“ténèbres gothiques” and so-called archaic scholasticism: “Accepter que le XVIe siècle français se déploie dans les cadres intellectuels du Moyen Âge est le premier pas nécessaire pour comprendre les éléments de modernité qui se greffent alors sur ces cadres.”60 In reading a poet such as Scève, medieval resources and frames of reference are germane to the intellectual and poetic underpinnings of his work. This point resonates throughout the present study.

60 Maurice Scève, Oeuvres complètes, Tome V, Microcosme, ed. Michèle Clément (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), 12. Clément discusses the oppositions between scholasticism and humanism, as well as poetry and philosophy in reference to Scève.

1 “Ce Poëte ayant quasi l’esprit et l’entendement de Dante” The human faculty of the imagination contributes to literary production; thus, medieval courtly love may be considered imaginary, a cultural invention of the mind expressed through poetic and narrative discourse. Courtly love provided a set of conventions for dialogue and interaction to take place among men and women about human love and desire, whether or not such desire was ever consummated. Even if male characters did most of the speaking, as it were, women were nonetheless indispensable participants in the dynamic. As an illustration of the continuity of courtly love topoi, in Lyon during Scève’s lifetime, Pernette du Guillet and her fellow Lyonnaise Louise Labé (if she authored the works attributed to her) used their pens effectively to participate in composing amatory lyric.1 Pernette, the young woman who became Scève’s pupil and ostensibly inspired the character Délie, reflected in the following dizain on the indispensable function of the lady in the courtly love dynamic: A qui est plus un Amant obligé Ou à Amour, ou vrayement à sa Dame? Car son service est par eulx redigé Au ranc de ceulx, qui ayment los, et fame. A luy il doibt le cueur, à elle l’Ame: Qui est autant, comme à tous deux la vie: L’un à l’honneur, l’autre à bien le convie: Et toutesfois voicy un tresgrand poinct, Lequel me rend ma pensée assouvie, C’est que sans Dame Amour ne seroit point.2

This dizain illustrates the continuity of medieval courtly love themes in the sixteenth-century French verse of Scève’s Lyonnais circle. In this dizain, Pernette 1 Mireille Huchon called into question the authorship of Louise Labé in Louise Labé: Une créature de papier (Geneva: Droz, 2006). 2 Pernette du Guillet, “A qui est plus un Amant obligé,” épigramme XXIV, in Rymes (1545), ed. Elise Rajchenbach (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 133. According to Barataud and Trudeau, eds., Rymes (Paris: Champion, 2006), the poem draws upon the first dialogue of Léon Hébreu (Leone Ebreo), though the poem’s conclusion contradicts the source (73, note 1). Rajchenbach situates the poem within the lineage of the medieval debate tradition, and cites the third dialogue of Léon Hébreu, noting that the authoritarian conclusion of epigram XXIV perverts the judiciary debate model (133, note 87). Barataud and Trudeau clarify that in line 5, the distinction is no longer between âme and esprit, but between âme and coeur; the lovers’ hearts must undergo distillation; cf. epigram XIII, 2 (73, note 6). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-002

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explores the companion roles of Love personified and the beloved.3 She demonstrates that the Lady fulfills an essential function on the courtly stage, even if that implies an abstract existence exclusively in the poet’s imagination, or a social game to exchange witty compliments within a literary salon. Although courtly love was distinct from social structures or the daily lives of women from an historical perspective, it still existed in the realm of ideas and the imagination, because it persisted in customary forms of expression including poetic and narrative discourse, and in courtoisie, courtesy (refined manners). In a medieval courtly context, and indeed in Pernette’s dizain, love became an allegorical character with an individual will exerted on mortals who loved and were loved, just as the god of love was personified in classical and medieval poetry, with variations, and notably in the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose. The pursuit of love, according to Pernette’s dizain, is as worthy as the pursuit of fame and glory; “eulx” could refer to the Dame, Amant and Amour, or it could refer to an unspecified courtly community. Love is conceived as faithful service based on the feudal model of master (masculine Dominus or Seigneur, and the corresponding feminine Domina, Domna, or Dame, with linguistic gender play in medieval Occitan midons), and the loyal, obedient subject such as a knight or vassal. A medieval metaphor to discuss courtly love, derived from Ovid and other Latin elegists and used by, among others, Andreas Capellanus in his Tractatus de amore, or De arte honeste amandi, was that the enamored one was serving in Love’s army, led by Cupid; men owed their beloved women absolute fealty.4 One cannot adequately serve two masters. The vocabulary in Pernette’s dizain reflects hierarchy according to the feudal dynamic: obligé, service, ranc (rang), doibt (from the verb devoir, meaning both to owe and to be obligated to do), and honneur. When faithful service is rendered, both master and servant accrue honor, each through fulfilment of one’s role. They are bound together, as the etymon of the cognate verbs to obligate (En.) and obliger (Fr.) indicates: Latin ob+ligare, to bind, to owe. But is service owed to the lady or love? To whose will should the lover submit? Pernette’s dizain poses these questions and provides a response. The lady leads the lover to bien, and the lover in turn owes his soul to her. Contrary to the medieval Ovidian love tradition, Pernette asserts the lady’s triumph, which gratifies her. If the courtly lover submits to the lady’s will, then he must do her bidding, rather than what he believes love directs him to do. For Pernette,

3 On women writing within a literary convention constructed by men, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence,” Yale French Studies 62 (October 1981), 135–53. 4 See John Jay Parry, trans., Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, 5.

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what matters is the lady, not the personification of love. The lady’s will manifests directly through her own expression communicated to the lover, rather than via the abstract will of love, which exists within the lover’s mind and heart. Love’s will is identified as an external, allegorized force. Pernette’s poem privileges the lady’s will over the masculine abstraction, Amour, analogous to Cupid, expressed through the man’s words. It may be envisaged as the struggle between two points in a love triangle to control the third and thereby dominate the relation: whose will presides for the lover and beloved? Pernette’s poem reveals the courtly salon game that evolved from medieval conventions of love poetry: Pernette’s poetic persona rejects the lover’s intent to seduce the lady by claiming to serve love’s will (a cover for his own), rather than the lover rhetorically subordinating himself to the lady as domina and leaving the outcome to her. The Renaissance poet-lover’s role expresses deference but is aligned with seduction, even within a Petrarchan mode. Both strategies are distinct from the writings of Guilhem de Peiteus (William IX of Poitiers, 1071–1126), the early troubadour and aristocrat who espoused both frank eroticism and subtle amatory sentiments in his verses. The poetic heritage of the troubadours included erotic aspects. Pernette’s conclusion resembles Dante’s in the Vita nuova: the young poetnarrator concludes that the god of love is consubstantial with the lady, or more precisely his lady. In Vita nuova 24, Amore, who has been Dante’s interlocuter and guide, tells Dante that Beatrice resembles himself, saying, “E chi volesse sottilmente considerare, quella Beatrice chiamerebbe Amore per molta simiglianza che ha meco” (And who wishes subtly to consider would call Beatrice Love for the great likeness she bears to me: VN 24.5). Following the envisioned exchange, Dante writes in a sonnet that Beatrice is virtually Love himself: “quell’ ha nome Amor, sì mi somiglia” (that other is named Love, so like me is she) (VN 24.9). Dante sets forth an elaborate justification for addressing Love as a person with a physical body and individual presence, invoking the authority of Aristotle and ancient Roman poets. His chosen words are haunted by echoes of his friend and rival poet Guido Cavalcanti: Dante defines Love as an accident inhering in a substance (“uno accidente in sustanzia,” VN 25.1).5 Dante claims the right to poetic license because his poetry

5 These terms are Aristotelian (see Categories) and were taken up by scholastics like Thomas Aquinas: the world is comprised of substance and accident (medieval scholastic praedicamenta), with substance being the more primordial. For Aristotle, essential and accidental properties of a substance were distinct. A substance signified a person or object, and an accident meant an attribute, quality, or event that occurred in relation to the substance.

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elegantly addresses ladies concerning love. Amore’s importance is reduced thereafter in the Vita nuova, and Beatrice takes precedence over the personification of Love. Prior to Dante, troubadours such as Arnaut Daniel were esteemed by early Italian poets, from the thirteenth-century Scuola siciliana (Sicilian school) to the dolce stil novo; the love conceits they established endured in European vernacular poetry for several centuries. In the introduction to his critical edition of Délie (2004), Gérard Defaux acknowledges the pertinence of Occitan lyric and the trobar clus style as part of the genesis of Scève’s text. Defaux writes: Il conviendrait peut-être de regarder plutôt vers l’occitan et de ne pas oublier le rôle que, par l’intermédiaire de Pétrarque, et de Dante derrière Pétrarque, par l’intermédiaire aussi d’humanistes comme Pietro Bembo, la lyrique provençale a pu jouer dans la longue et sinueuse genèse de la Délie.6

Dante, Petrarch, and Scève, as well as the troubadours, composed their verses about the unattainable, idealized lady, to whom the poetic persona subordinated himself and sought merci (or mercy, It. mercede, Oc. merzé). The elevation of the beloved is an essential aspect of courtly love. This idealization of the lady was parodied, and prolific Petrarchist imitations across Europe, leading to clichés and formulae, no doubt invited such parody. Literary relations between French and Italian regions were fraught with anxious rivalry, mutual influence, and fluctuations from the thirteenth to sixteenth century. From troubadours, whose extant manuscripts are mainly of Italian origin, to the Roman de la rose and tales of chivalry of Celtic and Breton origin, readers on the Italian peninsula absorbed a body of medieval Occitan and French material. Dante, Petrarch, Neoplatonists, and humanists exerted influence in turn upon readers in French regions, all the more so with the rise of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, and notably under François I (King of France, 1515–1547). Ambitions of protonational identity and the lust for glory impinged upon literary endeavors in both lands as elsewhere.7 Although Dante’s influence on subsequent Italian literature has been significant, his works suffered at the hands of certain critics and sometimes were ignored altogether outside Italy, including in France and England. Pietro Bembo’s influential treatise Prose della volgar lingua (1525) asserted the primacy

6 Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, p. xvi. 7 E.g., Dante, De vulgari eloquentia; Du Bellay, Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise (1549); and Ronsard, La Franciade (1572) for the first four of twenty-four chants of his unfinished epic poem in decasyllables.

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of Petrarch over Dante in lyric poetry. According to Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–1582), Petrarch was superior to Dante as a poet by virtue of his sonnets.8 The historian Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615), in his Recherches de la France (1560–1621), attacked both Dante and Petrarch as having stolen their art from the Occitan poets.9 This attitude was part of an anti-Italian backlash in the second half of the sixteenth century in France.10

Women, sex, and virtue Tensions between erotic desire and Christian morality that tainted such desire as sinful and forbidden existed in texts long before Petrarch put verse to paper. Theologians and other auctores condemned women in accordance with this Christian morality, intertwined with misogyny: as sexual beings, women tempted men to sin and were particularly susceptible to corruption, being weaker than men and descended from Eve, who was responsible for the post-lapsarian state of all mortals.11 This type of theological misogyny was not pervasive in all vernacular literature, and farces and fabliaux contained other varieties of misogyny. Petrarch espoused misogynous views in De vita solitaria, and Boccaccio did so in the Corbaccio. Postclassical poets confronted the polarity of erotic desire and conventional moral virtue concerning women. This tension between erotic desire and moral virtue distinguishes ancient Roman love elegy from the love poetry of Occitan, French, and Italian regions dating from ca. 1100 onward. The church officially associated erotic passion outside marriage with sin and evil, and a virtuous, respectable woman was not supposed to be tainted by unbridled sexuality. Even sexual pleasure within marriage was theologically suspect: Augustine writes in De bono coniugali (The Excellence of Marriage, ca. 401), “Marital

8 Jacques Peletier du Mans, Art poétique, 1555, Livre II, chap. 4, Du sonnet: “Et desquels le plus excellent a été François Pétrarque,” in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, 293. Dante, Cavalcanti, and others had written sonnets as well. 9 Étienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France, book VII, chap. 4: “Tellement que les Italiens emprunterent de nos Provençaux plusieurs belles pieces qu’ils transplanterent dedans leur vulgaire.” See also Recherches, book VII, chap. 6 on Italian poets. 10 See Henry Heller, Anti-Italianism in France (2003). 11 See, e.g., Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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intercourse for the sake of procreating is not sinful. When it is for the purpose of satisfying sensuality, but still with one’s spouse, because there is marital fidelity it is a venial sin. Adultery or fornication, however, is a mortal sin. For this reason abstinence from all sexual union is better even than marital intercourse performed for the purpose of procreating” (III, 6).12 Augustine invokes apostolic authority to insist that the purpose of marriage is procreation (IV, 32). A woman’s virtue was inextricably associated with her body and sexuality regardless of her character, comportment, or accomplishments.13 Theological and societal preoccupations with celibacy, fidelity, and virginity reflect this through sublimation and euphemism in language, as well as in the persistent madonna/whore dichotomy, another fundamental polarity concerning sex and women.14 A linguistic example of the cultural association of sex with shame occurs with the Latin verb pudere and related pudendus, implying shame (conflated with modesty), and pudicitia, chastity; from the Latin are derived pudeur (Fr.) and pudore (It). The “taint” of sex and desire emerged in cultural production in subtle ways elsewhere: certain language was common to the cult of Mary and to courtly love, and mystics of various traditions have employed sexual metaphors to articulate yearning and the ecstatic union of the soul with the divine, such that poetic motifs of love and sex were not discrete. This fluidity is disturbing for some readers. One vehicle for channeling or sublimating adoration for a woman into an acceptable religious impulse was devotional poetry for the Virgin Mary, as a poetic manifestation of spiritual praise for the celestial woman. Concerning Délie, I respectfully disagree with Gérard Defaux, who claimed that we could substitute Mary for Délie,15 notwithstanding erotic aspects in Scève’s lyric sequence. For this reader, Délie is not predominantly of a devotional, spiritual, or evangelical nature. Marian poetry, like mystical poetry, can manifest erotic traces, but this is not congruent with Christian doctrine concerning sexual mores. In the present reading, eroticism, as part of personal love and desire in Délie, is not an allegory for

12 Quoted in Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook, ed. Conor McCarthy (London: Routledge, 2004), 32. Source: Augustine, Marriage and Virginity, in D. G. Hunter, ed., The Works of Augustine 1:9, trans. Ray Kearney (New York: New City Press, 1999). 13 In De mulieribus claris, Boccaccio displays ambivalence toward women of accomplishment, at times casting judgment on sexual comportment as determining their moral virtue. 14 These conflicted views are still with us; much has changed, yet women are still ruthlessly judged in the public forum where inconsistent ideologies concerning sex and misogyny converge. 15 Gérard Defaux, “(Re)visiting Délie: Maurice Scève and Marian Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2001), 700. Defaux subsequently moderated this position: see his introduction to Délie (Droz, 2004). However, Defaux insists, “Derrière Délie, il y a Marie” (Délie, vol. 2, note to emblem 2, p. 39).

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Christian adoration or spiritual yearning, but exists on its own terms.16 Let us distinguish between religious motifs transposed to an amorous context in poetry, and erotic motifs transposed to a religious context. My view is that spirituality does not replace or subsume Scève’s love for Délie, as opposed to the poet-persona’s love being a vehicle for spiritual devotion to God and a Christian conversion experience. The poet-persona ardently desires Délie, and what he envisions as the culmination of this desire is not Christian or Neoplatonic contemplation. The devise of emblem 11, “de mort à vie” (Figure 1), concerns resurrection and les morts common to Christian doctrine, but the phoenix is not Christian, and the textual framework is the passionate love for Délie that transforms the poet: he adores the divine Délie (D 24), and metamorphoses into a pagan god (D 436). Pagan and erotic aspects of Scève’s text are germane to its interpretation.

Figure 1: Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 11, Le Phenix (“De mort à vie”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

16 Enzo Giudici cites Saulnier, vol. 1, 244–45 and vol. 2, 112 on the poet-lover’s desires, which include the erotic couched in sacred language. See Giudici, Maurice Scève, poeta della Délie, vol. 2, 499–500.

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We return to comparing Dante, Petrarch, and Scève in light of the erotic/ moral virtue polarity. Dante tends to sublimate erotic desire into adoration concerning Beatrice, who becomes a regal celestial guide who reunites with him in his vision of Paradise. In his Canzoniere, Petrarch self-consciously seeks poetic greatness through the very name of his beloved Laura and struggles with guilt about his persistent love both for his lady and for laurels, an attachment for which his character Augustinus berates him in the dialogue of the Secretum. In the concluding poem of the Canzoniere, canzone 366, Petrarch renounces his love for Laura altogether in a supplication to the Virgin Mary. In Délie, we find neither Petrarchan guilt nor predominantly Christian spirituality surrounding the beloved lady, but a quest for ecstasy through the contemplation of Délie’s perfection, and a longing for fulfilment through union. There is no Petrarchan dissidio for Scève, just as there is no dissidio for Dante, and this is a major distinction for these two poets in contrast to Petrarch concerning the beloved. While there is tension and desire in the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Scève, the nature and causes of that tension are distinct in Petrarch (his dissidio, the moral conflict in loving Laura), and there are parallels between Dante and Scève. While Petrarch laments unrequited love, Scève expresses ineffable love.17 As literary characters, Beatrice (in the Vita nuova) and Laura (in the Canzoniere and Triumphi) die in their youth, an event that marks each poet’s work, respectively, and highlights the memory of the lost lady. Pernette du Guillet dies in 1545, after the publication of Délie, and the poetic character Délie does not die in the course of Scève’s sequence, though the theme of death recurs in many dizains. Beatrice evolves from being a beautiful young girl whom Dante adores in the Vita nuova to functioning in the Commedia as an imposing spiritual guide in upper Purgatory and Paradise, akin to Socrates’s Diotima, or Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s Consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), or the interlocutor Sophia in Leone Ebreo’s dialogues of love. Petrarch’s lyric contains courtly love motifs. Petrarch’s sonnets in the Canzoniere were widely imitated in Europe; outside Italy, this imitation, for example, in France, Spain, and England, occurred mainly after the publication of Scève’s Délie. Concerning lyric genre, Scève wrote dizains rather than sonnets or chansons. Courtly love was much debated by scholars since the medievalist Gaston Paris coined the term amour courtois in 1883. The Italians admired and imitated the troubadours, and some wrote poetry in Occitan (for example, Sordello). The style trobar clus, developed by the troubadours, including Arnaut Daniel, established a model to be compared with the hermetic quality

17 See Jerry C. Nash, The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève, 1–2.

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of Scève’s poetry. The early Sicilian and Bolognese schools of vernacular lyric, as well as Dante in the rime petrose, also participated in this long literary tradition involving hidden meaning inscribed within a difficult text. Some of Tibullus’s Latin elegies may also be considered hermetic and difficult under this rubric. Petrarch composed a long lyric cycle in the Canzoniere, developing refined and restricted language, and introducing frequent figures of antithesis, omission of other medieval lyric forms in favor of the sonnet and canzone, and the combination of an introspective self, guilt and regret, memory, and vainglory. To shape the genre of the canzoniere, after Occitan chansonnier collections, Petrarch eliminated the prose commentary found in Dante’s Vita nuova, leaving only the poems.18 Prior to Petrarch, Guittone d’Arezzo (ca. 1230–1294) arranged his courtly sonnets (part of his rime d’amore) in cycles; following his conversion experience, Guittone renounced love poetry. The number of poems Petrarch chose to include in his cycle was not original. For example, the Livre de l’Ami et de l’Aimé (Catalan: Libre d’Amich e Amat) of Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–ca. 1316) contained 366 versets that corresponded to days of the year. Many of the “Petrarchan” motifs in Scève’s poetry (the innamoramento, the symbolic significance of the eyes and vision, the heart, the arrows that wound the poet-lover, the quest for mercy, and the Lady’s unwillingness or indifference) do not originate with Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Petrarch’s sonnets attracted numerous imitators, and the Canzoniere became the most important model for lyric love poetry in early modern Europe, for which Petrarchist verse could function as a mode to amuse sophisticated courts, akin to a game. Scève does not belong in that category of Petrarchists. His verse is serious, hermetic, Neoplatonist, and manifests other non-Petrarchist concerns. Scève precedes the Pléiade poets and is notoriously difficult to classify within the sodalitium lugdunense, the circle of poets in Lyon that included Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé.

Early modern views of Dante and Petrarch Pietro Bembo’s Aldine edition of the Commedia (Venice, 1502) altered the experience of reading Dante: from a manuscript belonging to Bembo’s father (a manuscript based on codices that had belonged to Petrarch and Boccaccio), Le terze 18 Robert Durling cites C. S. Lewis on Petrarch eliminating prose commentary to “invent” the canzoniere genre; see the introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 9–10. Sara Sturm-Maddox reiterates the point from C. S. Lewis in “Transformations of Courtly Love Poetry: Vita Nuova and Canzoniere,” in The Expansion and Transformations of Courtly Literature (1980), 132.

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rime di Dante, as the edition was entitled, suppressed all commentary, used new punctuation, and removed the trappings of Dante’s Florentine identity that had accrued during the Quattrocento.19 Dante became an “Italian” poet (italiano, Trissino’s label). In his 1525 Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo suppressed Dante, preferred Petrarch, and retained Petrarch and Boccaccio as the finest vernacular models: Perché, recando le molte parole in una, quando si farà per noi a dar giudicio di due scrittori, quale di loro più vaglia e quale meno, considerando a parte a parte il suono, il numero, la variazione, il decoro, e ultimamente la persuasione di ciascun di loro . . . potremo sicuramente conoscere e trarne la differenza. E perciò che tutte queste parti sono più abondevoli nel Boccaccio e nel Petrarca, che in alcuno degli altri scrittori di questa lingua . . . essi sono i più lodati e di maggior grido . . . niuno altro così buono o prosatore o rimatore è . . . come sono essi.20

This judgment carried weight, although it did not terminate debates between Dantisti and Petrarchisti. Editions of Petrarch’s poetry abounded following Bembo’s assessment.21 A quarter century later in France, Joachim Du Bellay likewise suppressed Dante and cited only Petrarch and Boccaccio in his treatise La deffence et illustration de la langue françoise (1549). The year prior, Thomas Sébillet praised Dante in his treatise Art poëtique françois (1548), which did not denigrate medieval poetic genres as did Du Bellay.22 In the wake of Aldine editions of Dante in Venice in 1502 and 1515, modifications in the printing of the Commedia pertained to commentary. Between 1520 and 1544, only three editions of the poem were printed, each with commentary. Two were introduced outside Italy, in Lyon.23 The editions of Dante’s Commedia printed by Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Rouillé (or Roville) set the standard for about thirty years.24 In a different publication, Rouillé likens Scève to Dante in his poetic achievement, emphasizing the quality of difficult poetry.25 Another

19 Corinna Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” in Dante Metamorphoses: Episodes in a Literary Afterlife (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 69. 20 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Milan: TEA [Tascabili degli Editori Associati], 1966), book 2, chap. 19, pp. 174–75. 21 Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, 145. 22 Sébillet, Art poëtique françois, book 1, ch. 1, in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, 54. 23 Parker, Dante in the Renaissance, 145–46. See also Brian Richardson’s index of Italian editions, 1470 to 1600, in Print Culture in Renaissance Italy (1995), 242–50. 24 Parker, Dante in the Renaissance, 146. 25 Rouillé, Promptuarii iconum insignorum a seculo hominum, subiectis eorum vitis (Lyon, 1553): “Hic Dantis Poëtae Italici, longe difficillimi, animum prope gerens, tam alto argumento, suam Deliam conscripsit, ut ab omnibus Poëtis nostrae aetatis, pro tanto tamque eximio

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clue to Scève’s esteem for Dante is found in Jean de Tournes’s dedicatory preface, in his 1547 edition of Dante’s Commedia with abbreviated commentary by Landino (whose commentary mentions Cavalcanti). In the preface, Jean de Tournes praised Scève for his contribution to the reading and interpretation of Dante.26 Thomas Hunkeler has noted in the preface of Jean de Tournes the juxtaposition of poetic styles, with Petrarch’s poetry being “soave et misurato” (suave et mesurée, smooth and measured) with Dante’s “erto et adumbrato” (raide et ombrageuse, steep and shadowed, connoting disquiet), with implications for Scève’s own writing and affinities with Dante’s poetry; Hunkeler shows how Scève combines these two styles in dizain 285 with its rhymes Dyaspre and aspre (lines 1 and 3).27 Petrarch’s poetry achieves extraordinary rhetorical beauty with the theme of unrequited love adapted from the courtly model. The text of the Canzoniere is self-contained and carefully arranged, designed, and articulated. Petrarch revised the poems and modified their order in the sequence during his lifetime.28 The text forms its own restricted universe with its own time frame, just as Dante’s Commedia does, although the cosmic scope of the latter work looks farther outward than the Canzoniere in its persistent preoccupation with the self. The Canzoniere constructs an impeccable temple to itself. The text is enclosed in the tower of its own rhetoric; the passions for the lady become eloquent constructions. The love poetry about the unattainable woman, composed in mostly sonnets, was expressed with highly refined language and a set of clever, versatile tropes suited for the production of verses, and it spawned copious imitations and intertextual references. In contrast, Délie was less unified, less coherent, less smooth, less consistent and restricted in its range of references, less carefully arranged (according to Saulnier, the dizains roughly follow their order of composition),29 obscure rather than lucid, impenetrable rather than accessible. Who could

opere, existimetur plurimum” (This man, displaying nearly the spirit of Dante, the Italian poet, a very difficult poet by far, composed his Delia [Délie] in such an elevated theme that he is esteemed most greatly by all the poets of our age, because of such great and exceptional work). Cited in Gérard Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, p. xxxvii. 26 Jean de Tournes: “dal soave et misurato dir di M. Francesco Petrarca, giunto or sia a un poco piu erto et adumbrato sono d’il Fiorentin Poeta, M. Dante Alighieri; (. . .) mi a guida il principal suo interprete . . . ,” from the preface to his edition of Dante’s Commedia (Lyon, 1547), cited in Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, p. 325. 27 Hunkeler, “Dante à Lyon: Des ‘rime petrose’ aux ‘durs épigrammes,’” 14. 28 The manuscript is the Vatican Lat. 3195 codex. Marco Santagata and others have called into question the sequence’s “finished” state, building on the work of Ernest Hatch Wilkins: see Luca Marcozzi, “Making the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, 51–61. 29 See Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 217.

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imitate Délie with success?30 Délie could not be easily duplicated or adapted by other poets (or poetasters). Although the Pléiade poets learned a great deal from Scève, their poetry pursued other paths and other styles. Conceptions of love differ between Petrarch and Scève, although both draw upon courtly traditions. Délie contains hints of mystical union, in addition to motifs of persistent desire for the lady, and vacillation between hope and despair that the poet’s love would be requited, which had characterized love lyric since the troubadours. Scève’s purpose and concerns were different from those of Petrarch. The 1547 Lyon edition of Dante’s Commedia, printed by Jean de Tournes, was dedicated to Scève. The 1545 printed edition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, likewise dedicated to Scève, and Triumphi (a Dantesque work composed in terza rima, which catalogued illustrious troubadours and lovers) also contained “Donna me prega,” Cavalcanti’s doctrinal poem. Jean de Tournes lauded Scève in his 1547 preface to Dante and drew a connection between the Florentine and Lyonnais poet.31 The giuntina anthology of Italian lyric (Florence, 1527), including lyrics of Dante and Cavalcanti, was printed in Lyon and available in Scève’s time. Thomas Hunkeler has pointed out that Scève’s resuscitation of Dante and Petrarch, along with Lyonnais printed editions, aligned with the momentum of humanistic resuscitation of classical texts, and French interest in Italian literary achievements; this manifested as “écriture en surimpression,” or épi-gramme.32 The poet and translator Charles Fontaine recognized affinities between Scève and Dante: Maurice Seve natif de la ville de Lyon, Poëte François, le plus celebré et admirable en toute doctrine, de tous ceux qui ont flory et escrit de son temps, a composé plusieurs Poësies, par lesquelles la renommée de son nom ne sera jamais ensevelie aux tenebres d’oubliance. Ce Poëte ayant quasi l’esprit et l’entendement de Dante, Poëte tres-obscur et difficile, a escrit sa Delie, d’un si haut subject et argument, que tous les Poëtes de nostre

30 Scève inspired imitators including Guillaume de La Tayssonnière, Claude de Taillemont, and Philibert Bugnyon. Du Bellay’s sonnet sequence the Olive (1549) and the Erreurs amoureuses (1549) of Pontus de Tyard show Scève’s influence, e.g.: “Mon oeil peu caut beuvant alterément / D’une beauté l’amoureuse douceur, / Glissantement m’attira dans le coeur / Le doux venin d’aggreable tourment” (Erreurs, book 3, sonnet 32, lines 1–4). But this does not compare with the vast number of diverse imitations that Petrarch’s Canzoniere generated. Délie was not to everyone’s taste. The Rymes (1545) of Pernette du Guillet, printed by Jean de Tournes in Lyon, proved more popular than Délie, going through four editions. 31 “dal soave et misurato dir di M. Francesco Petrarca, giunto or sia a un poco piu erto et adumbrato sono d’il Fiorentin Poeta, M. Dante Alighieri.” See Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 325, where the preface’s text is reproduced in full. 32 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 55–59.

Délie’s name

31

temps l’ont admiré, il a aussi composé un docte et rare livre intitulé Microsmos . . . . Brief en toutes choses ce brave Poëte s’est monstré d’un esprit tant singulier, qu’à bon droit nous le devons tenir pour admirable, et considérer plustost en ses escrits la profondeur de ses vers, que les paroles, qui sont neantmoins bien choisies.33

Petrarch is not mentioned, but Dante represents poetic excellence here, and Scève, whose work evinces admiration, approaches that standard with the depth of his verses. Hunkeler has noted the attributes of obscurity and difficulty that Fontaine ascribed to Scève and Dante here.34

Délie’s name We cannot be certain to what extent Pernette du Guillet was a model for Délie, just as we cannot be certain about Petrarch’s Laura or Dante’s Beatrice. The poet recreates and transforms her in the poetry (mimesis), developing symbolic significations. The symbolism of Délie’s name is complex, and interpretations have not attained consensus about which facet of the name should prevail. The name Délie does not appear to correspond to the historical identity of any woman known to Scève, although the case has been made convincingly for Pernette du Guillet as an inspiration.35 The Latin name Delia is an epithet of Diana, the moon (D 176), whom Dante mentions in Purgatorio 29. Other classical names for the moon include Luna, Hecate, and Selene (mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony). Diana and Hecate figure in Aeneid 6, and Dante refers to Hecate (Ecate) in Inferno 10. In Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), Boccaccio writes of the moon goddess Luna, daughter of Hyperion, whose other names include Diana, Artemis, and Hecate (4.16).36 Scève alludes to the triple moon goddess, and in dizain 131 to the virgin huntress Diana and Actaeon, her admirer and prey, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 3). Dante and

33 Charles Fontaine, Promptuaire des medalles des plus renommees personnes qui ont esté depuis le commencement du monde (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1577), part 2, p. 251. Cited in Hélène Diebold, Maurice Scève et la poésie de l’emblème (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), 9. Also cited in Thomas Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 272–73, in Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, p. 326, and in Guégan, ed., Œuvres poétiques complètes, p. lxxiii. Attribution of this edition’s seconde partie to Fontaine is considered problematic; see Charles Fontaine, un humaniste à Lyon, ed. Guillaume De Sauza and Elise Rajchenbach-Teller (Geneva: Droz, 2014), 259. 34 Hunkeler, “Dante à Lyon,” 12. 35 See, e.g., Saulnier, Maurice Scève, chap. 8. 36 Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1, 4.16, pp. 468–75.

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Petrarch referred to Diana, and both read Ovid.37 Scève’s poetic persona at times considers himself prey (see D 159). His love is impossible (or futile) if Diana spurns all male lovers. This contributes to the platonic and sublime aspect of his love: thus Délie is the eponymous “object de plus haulte vertu,” in female virtue’s affinity with chastity. The name Delia is found in the Latin elegies of Tibullus. In the verses of Tibullus and Propertius—whose Cynthia evokes the moon—we find the idea of a magicus nodus, a magic knot binding the lover to the beloved.38 This points to an interpretation in which Délie contains the French verbs lier and délier, to tie and to untie. Scève’s poetry engages in wordplay involving these verbs to illustrate the tie binding the poet to his beloved (for example, Délie/deslie in D 250). The semiotically rich name of Délie echoes the middle French words delié (delicate), délice, déli(c)t (with an amorous connotation), déliter, and délecter. In Latin, Scève associates Délie with delitia (delicia), implying delight and pleasure.39 The name Délie forms an anagram for l’idée, a Neoplatonic term that emphasizes the perfection of the lady in Scève’s dizains. This meaning, originating with La Croix du Maine, reduces the character of Délie to an abstract Platonic archetype,40 whether the idea points to a woman (“l’idéal féminin” as Brunetière put it, referring to Délie), or to an asexual, universal idea. According to Étienne Pasquier, Délie was a pseudonym for a mistress of Scève:41 “[Scève] se mettant en butte, à l’imitation des Italiens, une Maistresse qu’il celebra sous le nom de Delie.”42 The name Délie constitutes a senhal, a secret name for the poet-lover to conceal the identity of his beloved. The senhal was used by Occitan poets; Roman elegists employed pseudonyms in poetry to refer to the object of their affections. Petrarch’s Laura functioned as a senhal as well.

37 On Petrarch, see Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 95–109. 38 Dorothy Coleman, Maurice Scève, Poet of Love: Tradition and Originality (1975), 130. This motif occurs in one of the Lais of Marie de France. 39 In a Latin epigram to Ducher, “Maurice Scevae Lugdunensis ad Ducherium,” Scève engages in wordplay with delitia (delicia) and Délie’s name: “Delia si laetis blandum mihi ridet ocellis: / Non mirum: mea nam Delia delitiae est” (Delia, if she smiles at me alluringly with happy eyes: / It is no wonder, for my Delia is my delight). See Maurice Scève, Oeuvres complètes, edited by Pascal Quignard (Paris: Mercure, 1974), p. 361. 40 Saulnier, vol. I, 147. 41 Saulnier, vol. I, 147. 42 Estienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France, book VII, chap. 6: “De la grande flotte de poëtes que produisit le Regne du Roy Henry deuxiesme, et de la nouvelle forme de Poësie par eux introduite.”

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Scève’s Lyonnais milieu Biographical details for Maurice Scève’s existence are rather scant, and much is uncertain.43 In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Lyon was a prosperous, sophisticated city with Italian merchants, printers, and intellectuals who did not contend with repression from an institution such as the Sorbonne in Paris: no university yet existed in Lyon.44 Beginning in the 1470s, the book trade expanded in Lyon, and grew in importance. Lyon was a point of cultural and geographical convergence for the rivers Rhône and Saone, langue d’oc and langue d’oïl, French and Italian, Latin and vernaculars, and merchants and traders. Contacts resulted from the displacement of Italians in the wake of military actions by the French on the Italian peninsula from 1494 onward.45 The Scève family of Lyon possessed status and affluence, and the family tree included Italian branches. Using its social and economic privilege, the family furnished Maurice Scève with an education and the ability to engage in humanistic pursuits without the need for patronage. Scève evidently learned Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and perhaps Occitan.46 His three sisters were likely educated with him, and perhaps there was lively discussion with a humanist preceptor, with foreshadowing of future poetic engagement.47 Scève became a cleric, obtained a university degree before 1540, perhaps in law, and perhaps in Italy (Bologna, Padua, or Pavia?), although there is no documentary evidence for this.48 Scève’s name does not appear on university rosters at Avignon, so his degree was not acquired there, although he spent time in Avignon.49 We do not know what happened in

43 Albert Baur (1905), Bertrand Guégan (1927), and especially Verdun-Louis Saulnier (1948–1949) provided Scève’s biographical information. More recent accounts confirm the biographical uncertainty, e.g., Saulnier’s article on Scève in Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises, le XVIe siècle (2nd ed.), ed. Michel Simonin (Paris: Fayard and Librairie Générale Française, 2001), 1074–78; and Maurice Scève, Délie, ed. Nathalie Dauvois, Michèle Clément, and Xavier Bonnier (Paris: Atlande, 2012), 11–57. 44 See F. Bayard and P. Cayez, Histoire de Lyon (Le Coteau: Horvath, 1990) and R. Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1971). 45 The Italian Wars or Habsburg-Valois conflicts were fought between 1494 and 1559, including French invasions of the Duchy of Milan and disputes over the Kingdom of Naples. 46 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 30. 47 Michèle Clément notes that Scève’s education with his sisters “a sans doute contribué à construire [son] féminisme,” Maurice Scève, Délie (2012), 26. 48 Perhaps at Bologna or Pavia, as was the mode for young men of Lyon. See Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 29. Guégan believed Scève studied in Italy, but Saulnier had doubts due to lack of evidence. 49 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 29.

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his life between the years 1520 and 1530.50 Perhaps Scève spent time in Italy, but there is no record of it. As an intellectual and poet, Scève would have read Dante’s poetry in Italy if not in Lyon, replete with Italian books and culture. Copies of Dante were conserved at Blois, Fontainebleau, and elsewhere in private libraries, some with lavish illustrations.51 Since Italian readers considered Occitan troubadours to be literary ancestors of Dante, Scève would have encountered their manuscripts in Italy, if not in Avignon, Lyon, or Toulouse. The Jeux floraux were held at Toulouse, in which prizes were awarded for poetry in Occitan until 1513, and Occitan poetry was presented at the games throughout the sixteenth century.52 It was in 1533 that Scève “discovered” the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura in Avignon. This incident linked Scève’s name in a public manner with that of Petrarch, but contributed little to the development of Petrarchism in France among the literati. Petrarchism was already present in France before 1533, and the tombeau incident was viewed as a fait-divers, whereas the publication in Lyon of Luigi Alamanni’s Opere toscane (1532) was far more influential.53 Scève frequented fellow poets and humanists in Lyon including Clément Marot and Étienne Dolet. Through his education, or through interaction with Lyonnais intellectuals and printers, Scève encountered books and ideas that would later be reflected in his writings. Given the prevalent literary mode of imitatio, we may surmise what Scève would have read from his extant oeuvre.54 This approach has limits, as Saulnier observes, since Scève had the habit of being his

50 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 34–35. 51 Remo Ceserami, “Francia,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 3, p. 30. 52 John Charles Dawson, Toulouse in the Renaissance, Part I: The Floral Games of Toulouse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), 11. French replaced Latin as the official language of France in the decree of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, promulgated by François I. At the Jeux floraux, poems were presented and read in Occitan after 1513 but prizes were awarded only for poems in français. Starting in 1550, the Livre rouge recorded annual proceedings of the Jeux floraux from 1513 to 1641 (see Dawson, 9–10). A practice developed, the Essay, established in 1540, whereby poets were given the last line of poetry and had to compose on the spot; at first, poems took forms of a quatrain, huitain, or dizain. Later, the sonnet became the only form for the Essay (Dawson, 12–13, note 18). In the fourteenth century, Guilhem Molinier composed Las Leys d’Amors (rules for language, ca. 1341) for the seven founding “troubadours” of the Consistoire for the Jeux floraux in Toulouse, a prescriptive manual of rhetoric and grammar. What is notable is the overlap between the topic (love) and form (poetry manual) as reflected in the work’s title. “Amor” is synonymous with poetry; see Geneviève Hasenohr, “Leys d’Amors,” in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, Le Moyen Age (Paris: Fayard and Librairie Générale Française, 1992), 928. 53 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 48. 54 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 30.

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own source.55 Scève encountered currents of Neoplatonism, Evangelism, late scholasticism, neo-Latin, and love poetry, a blend of old and new. Since Scève’s lyric poetry was syncretic, it reflected diverse intellectual currents, often Italian in origin. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) had translated into Latin the works of Plato (1484) and Plotinus (1492) in Florence, rendering them accessible to those who could not read Greek. Ficino also translated philosophical sections of the Corpus Hermeticum. Italian poetry circulated in printed editions such as the giuntina anthology (1527) and Alamanni’s Opere toscane.56 Scève witnessed Christian mystery plays, processions during festivals, and the court Entrées (the Court was often in Lyon between 1525 and 1540). Scève composed a piece for the entry of Henri II into Lyon (1548).57 Saulnier writes of Scève, “Le Moyen-âge l’imprègne, jusque dans ses goûts populaires, mélange d’épaisseur et de mystique.”58 The medieval culture still present in the sixteenth century included written texts as well as visual and theatrical manifestations: processions, popular practices, and customs. The coexistence of Christianity, ancient pagan sources, and folk traditions, which combined religious and philosophical themes, indicated cultural ferment and syncretism. Pagan doctrines were revived during the early modern period (for example, Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, scepticism, Pythagorean number theory, hermeticism, and natural magic) in conjunction with reading or rediscovering ancient Greek and Latin texts. Cicero became a model for Latin style and Renaissance rhetoric, as well as for the synthesis of philosophical doctrines. Scève wandered among the thickets of ideas, cultivating whatever suited his purpose for his composition, rather than exclusively following one doctrine or system, whether poetic, philosophical, or religious. In Délie, Scève blended divergent systems and references, which coexisted in the poetic space of the text, divided into compact epigrammatic units. Concerning Scève and Christian thought, Saulnier comments: “[O]n ne saurait s’étonner que Dieu soit absent de Délie: Dieu ne brille pas non plus en majesté dans les madrigaux amoureux de tel homme d’Église comme l’aumônier SaintGelais. Et la curiosité et le respect des choses religieuses s’attesteront, précis, dans les Psaumes [et] dans Microcosme”.59 If a clerc composed poetry for a cultivated public, it did not necessarily imply that the verses were doctrinally oriented or

55 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 70. 56 See Jean Balsamo, “Les poètes français et les anthologies lyriques italiennes,” in Italique V (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 1–24. 57 See Maurice Scève, The Entry of Henri II into Lyon, September 1548, facsimile ed. Richard Cooper (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997). 58 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 33. 59 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 36.

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adhered to Christian precepts. Many early modern writers and poets were also priests or lay clergy, and some composed rather scandalous pieces. Scève dedicated his life to letters rather than to an expected legal, diplomatic, military, or ecclesiastical career available to the elite. There is no known record of his having held a municipal or court appointment in Lyon. Scève never married and spent some years in solitude. At least once he retired to Ile-Barbe in the northern vicinity of Lyon, on the river Saône, either to a monastery or to the residence of his brother-in-law Mathieu de Vauzelles.60 Scève apparently was not interested in public life or in cultivating a persona among his peers; he was introverted and reserved, and his rigorous standards and erudition earned esteem from colleagues. Marcel Raymond has written that Scève was “insoucieux du grand public” (unlike Ronsard).61 Nicolas Bourbon qualified Scève as “addictus Deo,” although Saulnier remarks that the god in question might as well be Apollo as the Christian God.62 The epithet “addictus Deo,” the solitary, quiet life without evident self-promotion as a poet or courtier, the dedication to writing, the hermetic poetry of Délie, and the biblical material treated in Microcosme all imply a preoccupation with spiritual, even mystical, matters.63 Scève is not dogmatic or pedantic in Délie; his concerns evidently evolve through the scope of his writings. In his encounters with Clément Marot, Scève would find that his fellow blasonneur possessed an abiding interest in medieval poetry, including the Roman de la rose and Villon. With La Deplourable fin de Flamete (1535), Scève translated a contemporary Spanish roman, Grimalte y Gradisa, written by Juan de Flores (ca. 1455–ca. 1525) and inspired by Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (ca. 1343–1344). Flamete contains themes of courtly love and unrequited passion. Scève writes in the “Epistre proemiale” of Flamete that love is an art to be learned, offering to readers “la mienne experimentée tourmente d’amours, que j’avais proposé vous manifester, pour vous apprendre [. . .] comme bon et expert marinier en la naufrageuse mer d’amour.”64 Scève calls love a cruel tyrant and presents the tale of Flamete to instruct his readers to “cauteleusement aymer . . . et saigement desaymer,” admitting that his best years passed in service to love. 60 Scève probably retired to l’Ile-Barbe several times between 1536 and 1549. See Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 131. 61 Marcel Raymond, L’influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550–1585) (Paris: Champion, 1927). Quoted in Coleman, Poet of Love, 45. 62 Coleman, Poet of Love, 35 and note 79. 63 Enzo Giudici writes concerning Scève, “Misticismo? Certamente. Ma misticismo umano e rinascimentale, ascesi terrena e trascendentale, non religiosa e trascendente.” (Mysticism? Certainly. But human and renascent mysticism, earthly and transcendental ascesis, not religious and transcendent.) Maurice Scève poeta della Delie, II, 499. 64 Maurice Scève, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pascal Quignard, 425.

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The juxtaposition of aimer and désaimer recall Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, whose topoi include advice on how to enter into and extricate oneself from a liaison, as well as the pleasure gained through reading despite the suffering caused by love. Boccaccio, an astute reader of Ovid (as Robert Hollander has shown), was also preoccupied with literary evocations of falling in love and extricating oneself from it, notably in the Fiammetta. We find the motto “souffrir se ouffrir,” found also in Arion (1536) with a comma. In Délie (1544) and La Saulsaye (1547) it becomes “Souffrir non souffrir.” The motto manifests the paradoxical nature of profound love in which the lover experiences both joy and devastation. The topos that amour produces suffering exists in the “Epistre proemiale” of Flamete. Love is defined in terms of loyal service, as the hero Grimalte submits to Flamete. Gilbert Gadoffre argued in La révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes (1997)65 that the ideology of heroic exploits bringing glory to chevaliers was transferred to humanist scholarship, and this pertains to Scève concerning Flamete. By 1536, Maurice Scève’s name was known in Lyon, and he was part of a fluid circle of intellectuals interested in poetry and humanism, the sodalitium lugdunense. This group involved students informally apprenticed to their teachers, including Louise Labé and Pernette du Guillet. They articulated ideals of courtly (incorporating courteous) conduct with respect to the belles amies savantes. This conduct included the poet committing himself in an “alliance” of amour chaste to one inaccessible lady to praise her (for instance, Visagier and Des Périers dedicated themselves to a nun). In practice, the circle did not exclude a variety of social relations ranging from intellectual exchange to banter to seduction.66 Codes of courtoisie were adopted, even for an amusing game. Social rituals of literary salons provided a framework for men and women to interact and discuss sophisticated ideas, in this context with humanism and poetic wit. We find echoes of this courtoisie, though without badinage galant, in Scève’s Délie. Scève likely met Pernette du Guillet, the ostensible inspiration for Délie, in a pedagogical context, as her tutor. Their encounter and potential involvement would have occurred between the years 1536 and 1543; this

65 Gadoffre, La révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Budé et François I, preface by Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 83. 66 On the sodalitium lugdunense, Saulnier notes: “L’appétit du beau savoir et de la droite conscience, celui qu’ils affirment le plus volontiers, n’exclut, en effet, ni le goût de l’amour (en amour courtois, sans doute, mais également sensuel), ni le plaisir du bien-boire et de la plaisanterie facétieuse . . . . [C]e sont relations qui vont du baiser à l’alcôve,” Maurice Scève, I, 116.

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corresponds to the dates of Pernette’s life, ca. 1520 to 1545.67 Scève was then composing dizains for his sequence. According to Saulnier, Scève’s name was seldom mentioned from the time of his death until the nineteenth century. Several clichés arose concerning Scève: he was obscure, a precursor of the Pléiade, and his masterpiece was La Saulsaye or Microcosme rather than Délie. Aside from the fame garnered during his lifetime, only in the twentieth century was Scève acknowledged as a major French poet who, according to Saulnier, had anticipated the Pléiade group by quietly applying the same poetic principles later promoted by the Pléiade, and especially by Joachim Du Bellay in the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise (1549).68 Detailing the faults of his French predecessors in poetry (including Marot, Heroët, Saint-Gelais, and Scève), Du Bellay alluded obliquely to Scève: “Quelque autre voulant trop s’eloingner du vulgaire, est tumbé en obscurité aussi difficile à eclersir en ses Ecriz aux plus Scavans, comme aux plus Ignares” (Deffence 2.2.46–48). Nonetheless, these predecessors were models despite Du Bellay’s ambivalence, as sonnet 62 of his Olive (1549) reveals.69 Du Bellay includes Scève in a canonical list of illustrious poets, each identified by his city (with Florence representing Petrarch) or, for the French poets, the river near each poet’s birthplace. Du Bellay undermines these French poets, including Scève: “Encor’ dira que la Touvre, et la Seine, / Avec’ la Saone arriveroient à peine / A la moitié d’un si divin ouvrage” (Olive 62.9–11). Du Bellay claims to surpass his fellow French poets and to achieve poetry worthy of Petrarch and the ancients. Dante is omitted, consistent with Pietro Bembo’s judgment favoring Petrarch as an ideal for vernacular poetry in Prose della volgar lingua (1525). Speroni has the interlocutor Pietro Bembo explain in his Dialogo delle lingue (1542): “lodo sommamente la nostra lingua volgare, cioè toscana . . . l’antica [lingua], onde sì dolcemente parlorno il Petrarca e il Boccaccio; ché la lingua di Dante sente bene e spesso più del lombardo che del toscano; e ove è toscano, è più tosto toscano di contado che di città” (je prise grandement notre langue vulgaire, je dy la tuscane . . . la vieille [langue] en laquelle Petrarque et Boccace ont si doulcement parlé. Car Dante sentoit beaucoup

67 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 151. 68 See Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 380–81. The quote from Du Bellay is in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Champion, 2003), vol. 1, p. 50. For an analysis of Scève’s influence on Du Bellay’s poetry, see Enzo Giudici, “Joachim Du Bellay et l’école lyonnaise,” L’Esprit Créateur 19, no. 3 (1979), 66–73. On Du Bellay’s Olive, Petrarch, and Scève, see JoAnn DellaNeva, “Du Bellay: Reader of Scève, Reader of Petrarch,” Romanic Review 79, no. 3 (1988), 401–41. 69 See William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 115–16.

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plus son lombart que le tuscan et là où il parle tuscan, il est beaucoup plus paysant que citadin).70 Speroni, whose dialogue continues a reflection initiated by Dante himself in De vulgari eloquentia, denigrates Dante’s vernacular language as unsophisticated and unworthy of imitation, preferring Petrarch and Boccaccio as models, as Bembo had set forth in Prose della volgar lingua. In the Deffence et illustration, Du Bellay exhorts French poets to imitate the ancients, and to elevate and enrich the French language as Italians had done with their vernacular. He praises the sonnet and seeks to discard medieval French forms like the rondeau and virelai. Du Bellay’s Olive (1549) was the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in French, as compared to Scève’s much longer dizain sequence. Concerning love poetry, Saulnier writes that the Pléiade owed to Scève “toute son initiation amoureuse.”71 In contrast to the Art poëtique françois of Sébillet, the Deffence advocated the use of classical models, avoidance of medieval poetic forms, and the writing of elevated verse worthy of immortality, criteria that Délie fulfills.72 Pontus de Tyard, a fellow Lyonnais, was greatly influenced by Scève in his love poetry. Pierre de Ronsard eclipsed Scève while replacing the dizain with the sonnet. Valéry Larbaud has remarked that most of Ronsard’s sonnets have an air of Scève’s dizains, with four verses too many.73 Ronsard’s sonnets do not consistently resemble Scève’s dizains, but Scève was a precursor of the Pléiade. In book 4 of the Recherches de la France (1560–1621), Étienne Pasquier contributed to the critical assessment of Maurice Scève as an obscure writer: Se mettant en butte, à l’imitation des Italiens, une Maitresse qu’il celebra sous le nom de Delie, non en sonnets, (car l’usage n’en estoit encore introduict) ains par dixains continuels, mais avecques un sens si tenebreux et obscur, que le lisant je disois estre très-content de ne l’entendre, puis qu’il ne vouloit estre entendu . . . . [Selon Du Bellay] il avoit banny l’ignorance de nostre poësie: et toutesfois la verité est qu’il affecta une obscurité sans raison.74

Pasquier dismisses Scève’s obscure style by claiming that the poet did not want to be understood. The abundance of recent scholarship and critical editions has helped to elucidate Scève’s poetry. McFarlane disputed the perception of

70 Sperone Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue (1542), translated into French by Claude Gruget (1551), reproduced in Joachim Du Bellay, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 240–41. 71 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 543. 72 Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 540. 73 Larbaud, Domaine français, quoted in Saulnier, chap. 21, note 57, II, p. 253. 74 Étienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France, book VII, chap. 6.

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obscurity in Scève’s poems, and more recently, Xavier Bonnier has thoroughly examined metaphor in Délie.75 According to Maurice de La Porte, Scève contributed significantly to the passage of French poetry “de la barbarie médiévale à la lumière moderne,” combatting what La Porte called “ceste monstrueuse ignorance poëtique.”76 This illustrates sixteenth-century post-Pléiade views of medieval lyric forms more than historical advancements in poetics. In any case, Scève’s poetry combined characteristics of medieval and Renaissance poetry, French, Italian and Latin, and antiquated and new attributes, including the visual emblems interspersed with the text, forming what Marcel Tetel has called a semantic polyvalence combining the woodcut image, devise, and gloss.77 The taste for emblems was inspired by Andrea Alciati’s emblem book Emblematum libellus (1534).

75 See McFarlane, Délie (1966), 1–5, and Xavier Bonnier, “Mes silentes clameurs” Métaphore et discours amoureux dans Délie de Maurice Scève (Paris: Champion, 2011). 76 Maurice de La Porte, Epithètes (1571), quoted in Saulnier, Maurice Scève, I, 544, and note 60 of chap. 21. 77 Marcel Tetel, Lectures Scéviennes, 7: “Un emblème est une énigme contenant une polyvalence sémantique. Il se compose du dessin, de la devise et de la glose.”

2 Scève and fin’amor: “Jouir d’un cœur, qui est tout tien amy” The medieval background of courtly love is relevant for Maurice Scève’s Délie in light of Dante’s writings and the Italian poetic tradition preceding Petrarch and early modern Neoplatonism. This background includes thematic conventions developed by the Occitan troubadours, and the trobar clus style within troubadour lyric. Scève’s Délie is part of a poetic continuum stemming from the troubadours to the dolce stil novo through Dante and Petrarch. Délie’s poetic background is not limited to Petrarch and love poets of Roman antiquity (principally Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus). Within this lineage, there are significant distinctions between the lyrics of fin’amor and works of Dante, Petrarch, Scève, and others. One distinction concerns the oral transmission of troubadour poems in song (canso, chanson, canzone), as opposed to a text in manuscript.1 Scève’s lyric sequence was architecturally structured and anchored in textual form on the page; it was meant to be read, and its emblems visually absorbed.2 Scholarly approaches to troubadour lyric are diverse: in Italy, troubadour lyric contributes to the study of early Italian literature; in England, it has been considered an aspect of medieval France; in France, it has been studied as a regional phenomenon; and in the United States, it is seldom studied except for its universal appeal—for example, within comparative literature.3 Defining courtly love, even asserting that it existed, has given rise to contentious debate.4 In 1883, the medievalist Gaston Paris coined the term “amour 1 If the poem transmitted orally is not written down, it is lost to posterity unless it survives in living memory. For a study of the medieval transition from song to written poem, see Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 2 On Délie’s architectural structure, see Doranne Fenoaltea, Si haulte architecture: The Design of Scève’s Délie (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982). 3 For an overview of past scholarship on the troubadours, see, e.g., Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction (1999), 1–7. See also Akehurst and Davis, eds., A Handbook of the Troubadours (1995), 1–9 (Akehurst), 11–18 (Zumthor), and 237–54 (Bond). Robert A. Taylor published a Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Troubadours and Old Occitan Literature (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015). Catherine Léglu shows the coexistence and evolution of vernaculars in Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan Narratives (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010). JoanFrancés Courouau and Isabelle Luciani analyze the reception of medieval Occitan literature following Jean de Nostredame’s Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (1575) in La réception des troubadours en Provence: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). 4 See Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (1977) for summaries and analysis of theories about courtly love. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-003

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courtois,” an expression alien to the Middle Ages, although Old Occitan cortez’ amor has been attested; “courtly love” identified an ideology manifested both in romans and in lyric poetry, plausibly an outgrowth of chivalric codes.5 Scholars frequently use terms unknown to the time period in question to develop literary or historical analysis ex post facto to craft a narrative about the past. It seems sensible to use the expression “courtly love” on that basis, and fin’amor in reference to the troubadours in particular. A. J. Denomy emphasized courtly love’s digression from Christian doctrine as “heresy,” noting that despite religious and secular disapproval of it, courtly love “has survived the satire of almost every century, the opposition inspired by the resurgence of the classics and of middleclass and puritan morality.”6 Denomy considered fin’amors amoral.7 Three factors distinguish courtly love from other types of love: love viewed as an ennobling force; the elevation of the beloved; and love as unsated, persistent desire.8 For Denomy, courtly love was not Christian caritas, and Christian sentiment was essentially absent from troubadour lyric; the troubadour conception of love diverged from Christian morality.9 However, Denomy also claimed that the true goal of fin’amor was moral improvement and virtue in the lover, rather than amorous union with the beloved; motivated by desire, the poet-lover improves in order to be worthy of the beloved, rather than pursuing the beloved as a means to access moral advancement. The concept of improvement and progress toward perfection is expressed in the Occitan term melhuramen (meaning “improvement” or “advancement”). In the Commedia, Dante the pilgrim undergoes improvement during his journey and becomes more worthy of Beatrice, and his process of purification in Purgatory supports that objective. Virtue is a necessary condition to attain love, as Scève likewise indicates: the “object de plus haulte vertu” is Délie, and in the concluding dizain 449, his love constitutes ardeur merged with vertu. Scève’s poet-lover undergoes improvement in pursuit of his love for Délie. Erotic desire in love is not a moral flaw to be purged, but is potentially compatible with virtue. The fervent adoration of the beloved and disregard for Christian sexual morality contributed to heterodox aspects of fin’amor. Thus the definition of virtue is of paramount importance. Robert Briffault argued that the troubadours sought sensual passion and expressed that in their lyrics, and only later did the cult of chaste love and

5 Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love, 4. 6 A. J. Denomy, The Heresy of Courtly Love (New York: McMullen, 1947), 20. 7 Denomy, “An Inquiry into the Origins of Courtly Love,” Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945), 139–207, esp. 179–86. 8 Denomy, Heresy of Courtly Love, 20. 9 Denomy, Heresy of Courtly Love, 25 and 27.

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idealization of women develop.10 In 1968, D. W. Robertson denied the existence of courtly love and instead identified “idolatrous passion,” which he considered a “chronic human weakness” that was not uniquely medieval; he declared that courtly love was sentimentalized by the Victorians.11 Peter Dronke, in contrast, found evidence of courtly love in an extensive study of diverse cultural traditions. Yet even with Dronke’s considerable scholarly contributions to our understanding of medieval lyric, such a universal scope does not advance us very far in defining medieval courtly love, which lies at the confluence of love and courtliness.12 Sources, origins, and recognition of common ground are useful but insufficient to explain novel or unique aspects of literary development, whereas comparison itself allows us to perceive salient features by identifying distinctions. Themes of passionate and idolatrous love are present to some extent in the writings of troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. Jean-Charles Huchet comments on the social milieu in which fin’amor thrived: “Moins fortement christianisée, moins féodalisée . . . l’Occitanie offrait un tissu sociologique et institutionnel plus favorable à l’articulation d’un chant d’amour profane où la femme est vénérée au prix d’une inversion des rapports sociaux. [. . .] Une plus forte romanisation avait à la fois maintenu une tradition scolaire vivace et un droit apte à freiner la rigidité d’un féodalisme viril.”13 Huchet surmises that women’s social or legal status did not improve with fin’amors, however. Concerning courtly love, there was a gap between medieval poetic and rhetorical practices and historically documented social behavior. Sarah Kay observes: “The fictions of [medieval] romance, then, certainly are not a direct reflection of the social practices of their audience, although they may of course reflect their fantasies.”14 I employ the term courtly love to designate a set of conventions in literary texts for addressing the subject of love, not a sociohistorical phenomenon within “courtly” society. In other words, it is a poetic

10 See Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 102 sq. 11 D. W. Robertson, “The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts” (1968), in Essays in Medieval Culture, 1980, 267–72, esp. 268–71. This polemical essay by the Chaucer scholar was intended to be a bracing corrective to fanciful notions of medieval courtly love that circulated among Robertson’s peers. 12 Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), esp. vol. 1, 1–97; mentioned in Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love, 5. Dronke demonstrates the relevance of Latin lyric for the troubadours. 13 Jean-Charles Huchet, L’Amour discourtois: La fin’amors chez les premiers troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1987), 14. 14 Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love,” in Roberta L. Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 83.

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system, not a social structure. The divergence between conceptions of women in texts and societal experiences becomes more pronounced over time: Ian Maclean finds that “at the end of the Renaissance, there is a greater discrepancy between social realities and the current notion of woman than at the beginning.”15 As further illustration that courtly love conventions existed within discourse, in lyric and narrative but not in social custom (besides etiquette), we recall the fate of Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Inferno 5: the lovers are killed by the husband for violating the bond of marriage (that is, unauthorized access to the husband’s property); it is hardly a demonstration of tolerance or compassion for an indiscretion. That may be the implicit message of Dante’s canto: Francesca, addled with anachronistic tales of knights and ladies, indulges in sensual pleasures inspired by courtly love in a social environment that forbids such liaisons, and is condemned twice for such a grave error. She is killed with Paolo and is then relegated, together with Paolo, to the whirlwind in Hell for eternity.16 Dante the pilgrim faints in reaction to learning this (Inf. 5.141–42), indicating its narrative force for his own love experience. Fin’amor and courtly love constitute a thematic thread in literary texts, linking the poetic practices of premodern and early modern poets. Sicilian and, subsequently, Tuscan poets including Dante and Petrarch were indebted to the troubadours, and Scève in turn read them and plausibly troubadour lyric as well. Northern trouvères writing in ancien français also bore the imprint of the troubadours. The devotional cult of Mary displays certain conventions of courtly love in its figurative language and tone. Laura Kendrick has argued that the troubadours were indebted to Mariology, with Mary as domina; in the Eastern Orthodox church, Mary was associated with sophia, divine wisdom.17 Gérard Defaux (2001) drew a comparison between Délie and Marian poetry with respect to their praise of an idealized, divine lady within the sacred context of religious adoration. Michelangelo Picone has pointed out that in medieval Italian lyric there was “constant interference of the sacred and profane registers, of eros and caritas.”18 When such interplay exists, an interpretive ideology that excludes, reduces,

15 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, 1. 16 For a survey of interpretations on Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, including commentators of the Commedia and Boccaccio, see Elena Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014). 17 Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 140–146. 18 Michelangelo Picone, “Traditional Genres and Poetic Innovation in Thirteenth-Century Italian Lyric Poetry,” in William D. Paden, ed., Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 147.

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dismisses, denies, or allegorizes away either the erotic or the spiritual in the text misses the mark in discerning the text’s meanings. Inconsistency and ambiguity are often present in literary production, along with paradox; these do not fit neatly into schemata. In L’amour et l’occident (1938, 1956), Denis de Rougemont distinguished between the conflicting feudal code and the courtly chivalric code. An example of this occurs in the legend of Tristan and Iseut when Mark’s barons defend the king’s honor and are identified as “feluns,” although they were performing their proper duty in being loyal to their ruler and serving him well.19 By contrast, Tristan betrays his king by having an affair with the king’s betrothed, and the bride Iseut betrays Mark as well.20 The code of amour courtois undermines feudal code in the story, and the protagonists endure calumny but are viewed sympathetically within the legend despite their transgressions. According to medieval courtly code (in a literary rather than sociohistorical context), which Petrarch and Petrarchan poets adapted for their purposes, the lover is to subordinate himself to the beloved lady and commit himself to faithfully honor her wishes and commands, just as a knight would serve a feudal lord. The poet would also serve the god of love, who could appear as an allegorical character, as he does in the verses of Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. In the first part of the Roman de la rose, the initial author Guillaume de Lorris has the narrator dream that he is compelled to serve the god of love, represented as a medieval grand seigneur. By the same token, Dante’s dream vision with his flaming heart involves the lord of love, who appears to Dante and counsels him in the Vita nuova. Chrétien de Troyes blended sacred and erotic motifs in an example of “interference” (Picone) in the late twelfth-century Chevalier de la charrette, in an adulterous scene of the erotic encounter of Lancelot and Guinevere: et puis vint au lit la reïne, si l’aore et se li ancline, car an nul cors saint ne croit tant. [. . .] Au lever fu il droiz martirs, tant li fu gries li departirs car il i suefre grant martire. (vv. 4651–53, 4689–91)21

19 Denis de Rougemont, L’amour et l’occident, 31–33. 20 King Mark’s attributes vary according to the written version of the medieval legend: the socalled versions courtoises (Thomas, Gottfried von Strassburg, Malory) portray him more sympathetically than the vengeful, cruel figure in the versions communes (Béroul and Eilhart von Oberge). 21 Citation is from Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot), ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de Poche “Lettres Gothiques”, 1992.

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(and then he came to the queen’s bed, and worshipped and bowed down before her, for there was no holy relic in which he had greater faith . . . When he rose he was just like a martyr, so sorry was he to leave since it made him suffer such great martyrdom.)22

The intersection between religious and erotic language to evoke union may emphasize either type of discourse, meaning religious language may describe an erotic scene, as it does here, or conversely, erotic language may describe a spiritual experience. For Lancelot, sex and intimacy with Guinevere, while absolutely forbidden and a betrayal of his king, are also portrayed as the highest pleasures and most intense experiences, and Chrétien uses tropes with sacred language, including reverence for relics, to emphasize this point. Besides Lancelot’s feudal treachery, it would be considered sacrilegious to love another mortal more than God, because such an extreme degree of passionate devotion is reserved only for the godhead. Such misdirected passion, akin to Occitan fol’amor, is anathema from an ecclesiastical standpoint, as it undermines the primacy of the church. Another example in ancien français of sacred juxtaposed with profane language concerning relics and an erotic episode occurs near the end of the second part of the Roman de la rose: the lover seeks a religious relic in the form of a statue of a beautiful woman (the reliquary), which represents the female sexual anatomy, a sacred, hidden treasure: “Avoit dedenz .i. saintuaire / Couvert d’un precieus suaire, / Le plus gentill et le plus noble” (vv. 20811–13).23 The lovernarrator is on a pilgrimage to reach these relics: “Si m’i sui je par Dieu voez / As reliques que vous oez” (vv. 21247–8).24 His objective is this: “Que je ne joïsse de la rose!” (v. 21254). The language of religious symbolism, including the vow, alludes to sex. This passage and others near the text’s conclusion may be interpreted as sacrilegious due to their treatment of sacred objects (relics), as well as their allegorized treatment of what is actually sexual conquest, defined in Christian morality as profane, although the passage subverts these categories, and sex is treated as sacred. The dream allegory of the Roman de la rose may protect against risk of ecclesiastical condemnation, as the reader is reminded at the very end of the poem. The jumbled and mixed metaphors at the end (the staff, sack, hammering, shrine, and rosebush) give credence to an interpretation

22 Cited in Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks and Courtly Love,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82. 23 Quotes are from Le Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: “Lettres Gothiques,” Livre de Poche, 1992), based on mss. BN 12786 and BN 378. 24 The lover in the Roman de la rose is identified as being on a pelerinage in v. 21356 and surrounding discussion.

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involving humor and irony.25 The pilgrim penetrates the treasures within, takes the virginity of the young woman, and plucks the rose, in verse narrative couched in religious terms. The rose lacks autonomy and agency, unable to give or withhold consent; physical signs of female arousal are noted in the text, but the rose is passive and silent. Spiritual imagery is blended with an erotic theme in the Roman de la rose: M’agenoillai sanz demorer, Car mout oi grant fain d’aorer Le biau saintuaire honorable De cuer devost et piteable. (vv. 21595–8) (I got on my knees without delay, because I had great hunger to adore the beautiful, honorable sanctuary with a devoted and pious heart.)

Consistent with the troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes concerning Lancelot and Guinevere, and the Roman de la rose, Scève also blended spiritual and erotic imagery in his love poetry.26 If Dante was the author of the Fiore, an adaptation of the Roman de la rose in 232 sonnets, then he explored the quest for sensual love in that early work, and perhaps the candida rosa of Paradiso constituted a revision, a purification of the profane fiore from Dante’s poetic past. In Les mythes de l’amour (1961), Denis de Rougemont suggested that a balanced combination of agape and eros was preferable in a union of two people in love: S’il est vrai que la passion cherche l’Inaccessible, et s’il est vrai que l’Autre en tant que tel reste aux yeux d’un amour exigeant le mystère le mieux défendu,—Éros et Agapè ne

25 Charles Dahlberg finds humor in the scene; see note to line 21347, p. 424 of his English translation, The Romance of the Rose, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). It is indeed possible to interpret the culmination of Jean de Meun’s portion as ludicrous and entertaining, and to view the adventures of Lancelot seeking Guinevere in the same light, in the Chevalier de la Charrette of Chrétien de Troyes. Simon Gaunt in Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) suggests that critical distance and humor are present in medieval lyric as well as narrative: Gaunt discusses medieval irony as a rhetorical trope in the context of allegoria, dependent on a text’s implicit meaning discerned by an initiated audience (pp. 1–19). He comments that “humor, irony and playfulness are inherent in courtly culture from the outset” (183). 26 Kathryn Banks has written cogently on Scève’s blending of sacred and erotic language in “AGAPÈ et ÉROS: Amour religieux et amour érotique dans la Délie de Scève,” in Maurice Scève ou l’emblème de la perfection enchevêtrée (2012), pp. 117–29. Banks notes the blending of erotic and divine love in Speroni and Leone Ebreo, and Ebreo’s moon symbolism relevant for Scève (pp. 121–122).

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pourraient-ils nouer une alliance paradoxale au sein même du mariage accepté? Tout Autre n’est-il pas l’Inaccessible, et toute femme aimée une Iseut, même si nul interdit moral ou nul tabou ne vient symboliser, pour les besoins de la fable et la commodité du romancier, l’essence même de l’obstacle excitant, celui qui ne dépendra jamais que de l’être même: l’autonomie de la personne aimée, son étrangeté fascinante?27

The paradoxical blend recalls sacred marriage or hierogamy (hieros gamos in Greek) in which sexual union does not imply moral degradation, sin, or corruption, but rather sex integrated with the sacred nature of the coupling. The union is exalted, not forbidden or profane, and intimacy in hierogamy is divine, the joining of body and soul. The concept of hierogamy was ancient, often linked with fertility, and incompatible with what became orthodox Christian doctrine. Neoplatonism and even canonical Christian texts, such as the biblical Song of Songs (Canticum canticorum), contained what Dronke called “fantasies of loveunions” involving mystical or cosmic convergence, such as the Neoplatonic union of nous (divine mind) and anima mundi (world soul), or the Gnostic union of nous and sophia.28 Human beings who aspire to mystical marriage (hieros gamos) imitate divine union, as an initation. Copulation becomes divine, rather than functioning to appease bestial appetites of the body. Human love-union corresponds to divine love-union as a microcosm reflects its macrocosm, and living creatures are related to their divine source. The union entails transformation and transcendence. The hermetic text Asclepius contains a passage about reproduction: Procreatione enim uterque plenus est sexus et eius utriusque conexio aut, quod est verius, unitas inconprehensibilis est, quem sive Cupidinem sive Venerem sive utrumque recte poteris nuncupare. Hoc ergo omni vero verius manifestiusque mente percipito, quod ex domino illo totius naturae deo hoc sit cunctis in aeternum procreandi inventum tributumque mysterium, cui summa caritas, laetitia, hilaritas, cupiditas amorque divinus innatus est. Et dicendum foret quanta sit eius mysterii vis atque necessitas, nisi ex sui contemplatione unicuique ex intimo sensu nota esse potuisset. (§ 21) (For each sex is full of fecundity, and the linking of the two or, more accurately, their union is incomprehensible. If you call it Cupid or Venus or both, you will be correct. Grasp this in your mind as truer and plainer than anything else: that god, this master of the whole of nature, devised and granted to all things this mystery of procreation unto

27 Denis de Rougement, Les mythes de l’amour, 80–81. 28 Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 89.

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eternity, in which arose the greatest affection, pleasure, gaiety, desire and love divine. One should explain how great is the force and compulsion of this mystery, were it not that each individual already knows from contemplation and inward consciousness.29

The Asclepius passage goes on to describe the copulation of a woman and man as an act of mystery bringing forth divinity in each person.30 The act is performed in secret to protect the lovers from the public’s reactions, which involve ignorance, disrespect, scorn, disapproval, or condemnation. Sexual union parallels spiritual union: copulation signifies spiritual union, which in turn is illustrated through sexual metaphors and allegory. Such allegory figures in the church’s iconography of the bride and bridegroom: Christ (sponsus) is united with the Virgin Mary or with the church; either one is relegated to the role of sponsa.31 Nuns are also identified as “brides of Christ,” whereas the ecclesiastical metaphor of marital union does not involve coitus. The Latin coitus (from the verb coire) connotes union (literal or figurative). In the Mystical Ark (Benjamin Major) and in short treatises, Richard of Saint Victor (d. 1173) employs erotic imagery to explain the high stages of contemplation, without explicit union. In discussions of mysticism in Latin Christian texts from the twelfth century onward, metaphors and analogies notwithstanding, theological resistance arose against the concept of ontological union in essence or substance between a human being and God: an unitas spiritus was preferred to a transmutation into the divine nature.32 It bordered on blasphemy to imply, as did the Sufi mystic Hallaj in an Islamic context, that human beings were divine or consubstantial with God, although if one posits that God creates human souls that journey to God to reunite with the divine entity that created them, then this may be a reasonable stance. It is contingent on the degree of estrangement between divine creator and mortal creature, and on the nature of the soul. The authorities of traditional doctrines of the Abrahamic religions were reticent to set forth such a concept due

29 In Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, vol. 1, p. 90, Dronke cites Asclepius from the Corpus Hermeticum, ed. Arthur Darby Nock and André-Jean Festugière (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 321–22. The Latin text is from this edition, Asclepius, §21. The English translation is from Brian Copenhaver’s edition, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 78–79. 30 Asclepius, §21. 31 See Peggy Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth Century France, 56 sq. Twelfth-century Marian commentaries on the Song of Songs identified Mary as both mother and bride of Christ (59). 32 See Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Union in the Western Christian Tradition,” in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 63.

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to the perceived hubristic quality of the claim, which dissolves the division between creator and creature. Without the divine aspect, there may be denigration of the person and mortal body with bleak materialism. For Dante, Beatrice, the divine sponsa, could fulfill him, with the poet-lover as Christ and sponsus (or perhaps with roles reversed?): Dante’s pilgrimage culminates in a reunion with her in Paradise. Is the union spiritual, carnal, or both? It depends on the heterodoxy of the interpretation. Dante’s reunion with Beatrice alludes to the Song of Songs, as when “Veni sponsa de Libano” (come, spouse from Lebanon: Purg. 30.11, from Canticum canticorum 4:8, Vulgate) is sung. By the same token, Scève’s poet-persona seeks divine union with Délie. This does not conform to orthodox Christian doctrine, which holds that human love is mutable and flawed, whereas divine love is perfect and eternal.33 Erotic desire, passionate pleasure, and profound sexual union (as conceptually distinct from the necessity of procreation) have no place in the orthodox Christian conception of divine love, whose ideal is defined strictly as caritas. Erotic aspects of love lyric present an aporia for spiritual interpretation; what is to be done with them? Does the poet really mean something else? The Song of Songs, for example, was allegorized in Hebrew tradition to mean something else (God and Israel), and subsequently by Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others. These allegories were not found in the text itself. The aporia stems from the relegation of sex and the erotic to the realm of the profane and degraded, in opposition to the sacred; Ficino develops a similar hierarchy in De amore. The only way for Christians to access the sacred is by relinquishing the erotic, for it is considered forbidden and sinful. This idea is not universal across human cultures, moral systems, or religious traditions. Instead, cultural and legal restrictions on sex constituted societal attempts (however flawed) to regulate reproduction and family structures. Societal and theological rules were subverted in storytelling, poetry, imagination, philosophical speculation, and ideas from other cultures including pagan antiquity. This led to the coexistence of inconsistent ideas. Scève’s Délie does not adhere to the Christian view that erotic, passionate, personal love is sinful, whereas Petrarch’s dissidio in the Canzoniere stems from a profound ambivalence concerning courtly love and Christian ideals, temptation, and salvation. In the Commedia, Dante condemns Francesca’s misunderstanding of love based on courtly literature; the pilgrim seems to purify and partly sublimate his own desire, and is united in Paradise with a divine and wise Beatrice. For his part, Petrarch has no concern with rivals or jealous husbands because Laura is utterly chaste; his only temporary

33 See Dronke, Medieval Latin, vol. I, 93.

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rival is the sun god (Rvf 115). Petrarch seldom mentions other women except the Virgin Mary, especially in the supplication to her in Rvf 366. Scève adheres to the courtly code, and the poet-lover is not deterred by adulterous transgression that he would be committing with Délie against her husband (D 161).

Troubadour love The Occitan troubadours made significant contributions to European literary conceptions of love. The troubadours flourished in Poitou, Gascony, and later in Provence, ca. 1100–1270, and were then in decline until about 1350; trobairitz (women troubadours) composed and performed as well. From the twelfth century, Occitan courts were centers of political and social life; they began to cultivate refined behavior in which women played an important role. Wandering (male) minstrels or joglars praised women in their songs, lyric poems performed orally. More sophisticated than joglars and composing verses in addition to performing them, the troubadours praised courts where intelligent conversation and civilized behavior were prominent, and denounced boorish behavior elsewhere. The Old Occitan term fin’amor,34 refined or pure love (as opposed to fol’amor, dangerous and mad love), reflects this taste for refinement and civility. Fin’amor draws attention away from socially determined rank and custom to focus on the intensity and purity of inner feeling; the word fina suggests the refining of metal.35 The alchemical imagery of refining substances to illustrate conceptions of love is present in the poetry of Dante and Scève. Concerning Islamic literary culture in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) as a precursor to troubadour love lyric, Robert Briffault (1945, 1965), drawing on the work of Nicholson (1907, 1914, and 1921), Nykl (1931 and 1933), and others, noted the development of mozarabic love lyric prior to the Occitan troubadours.36 Jean-Charles Huchet acknowledged common ground between troubadours and poetry of Islamic origin: “En tant qu’érotique, la fin’amors développe

34 Fin’amor, fina + amor, which was feminine; the gender of the noun amor/amour was unstable into the sixteenth century. On the development of fin’amor, see Moshe Lazar, “Fin’amor,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, (1995), 61–100. 35 Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks and Courtly Love,” 85. 36 Briffault, The Troubadours, 24–79. Orig. Les troubadours et le sentiment romanesque (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1945).

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une mystique de l’amour à la fois proche d’un certain mysticisme chrétien et d’un culte de l’amour déjà à l’œuvre chez les poètes arabes.”37 María Rosa Menocal38 argued that Arabic love poetry contributed to the development of medieval Occitan love poetry. However, J. A. Abu-Haidar has demonstrated philologically that Arabic love lyric of al-Andalus and troubadour lyric constituted distinct developments.39 Vernacular courtly lyric developed in Arabic Sicily at the court of Frederick II (1194–1250, ruled 1220–1250) with the approximately thirty poets known collectively as the Scuola siciliana. The first attested sonnets of Giacomo da Lentini emerged from this Sicilian court, and poetry of the Scuola siciliana on refined love influenced the Tuscan stilnovisti to the north. Whereas troubadours typically performed at court as professional poets, thirteenth-century Italian lyric poets were frequently intellectuals and bureaucrats who wrote poetry as amateurs. Whereas troubadour lyric was performed musically, Italian poems were written to be read, not sung. The audience, context, and purpose of lyric poetry were not monolithic.40 The troubadours produced poems within conventional structures, frequently on the subject of love: lauding the chosen lady, usually married and inaccessible, for her beauty, her nobility, perhaps her virtue, and other qualities. The poet often sought to be ennobled and exalted by his love for the lady; perhaps he sought an adulterous liaison with her, and perhaps the love was unrequited. He might perform tasks to win her favor. He wrote of waiting and doubting and hoping, appealing to his lady’s generosity by voicing his sweet suffering. The poet’s expression of anticipation provided a rhetorical conceit to generate verses in which the situation was not resolved, but remained uncertain. Since the troubadours participated in literary and performative conventions, the notion of the sincerity of the poet’s verses is superfluous. In addition to linguistic ambiguity and possible irony, prudent readers cannot interpret the words literally and assume the poet is relating real events or genuinely felt sentiments. As Paolo Cherchi has observed, the troubadour was an actor who perfected the artistic illusion of the love dilemma through the song.41 Each poem came to life in musical, oral performance. The

37 Huchet, L’Amour discourtois, 15. 38 Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 39 J. A. Abu-Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon, 2001). 40 Picone, “Traditional Genres and Poetic Innovation in Thirteenth-Century Italian Lyric Poetry,” 148–50. 41 Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love, 70.

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Occitan verb trobar corresponds to the Latin verb invenire (to find, to come upon), a cognate of the French trouver and the Italian trovare. A textual framework with emblems presents the poetic persona of Scève, who likewise perpetuates his sweet suffering in the love situation through the sequence of dizains of Délie, as Petrarch did within the textual framework of the Canzoniere. Menocal notes that besides external obstacles to fulfilment in love including marriage and social rank, troubadours lament the internal, psychological, and “poetic” obstacles stemming from disappointment, which contribute to poetic production.42 The obstacles to fulfilment in love differ in Petrarch’s and Scève’s respective lyric sequences. Laura in vita is unavailable, and in morte the prospect is gone; Petrarch’s moral conflict constitutes another significant obstacle. For Scève, Délie does not consistently respond favorably to the poet-lover, and her marriage hinders a liaison. The poet-lover continues to desire her, but lament and disappointment are frequent themes; there is also evocation of union and fulfilment. For Dante, Beatrice is unavailable, and then she dies (as recounted in the Vita nuova), but in the Commedia, Dante envisions a triumphant reunion with her in the earthly paradise, in which she guides him to heaven. This outcome transcends the mode of fin’amor. The troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève present poetry as a central concern, its form expressing the dynamics of love. This constitutes the poetic lineage with its noble subject, composed in vernacular languages deemed worthy for such expression. The Occitan title with which troubadour poets addressed the beloved was the masculine midons43 (derived from the Latin meus dominus, meaning “my master” or “my lord”). From the moment the hierarchical and symbiotic relationship is established between poet and lady, the poet tends to subvert it with laments, persuasion, praise, and flattery in order to find favor with the lady. Tension exists between incompatible ideals, courtly and Christian: the courtly dynamic tends to point to adultery since the lady is usually married. Christian moral and social principles would dictate that an honorable, respectable woman is not supposed to be unfaithful to her husband, nor should sexual desire dominate her actions. Thus, courtly love poetry takes on an aura of secrecy, which only inflames the poet-lover’s forbidden desire, serving as a vehicle with which he generates his verses. If the lady is married, then presumably, she is not a virgin, and the cultural value of virginity in young women becomes less important, whereas the court is very much concerned with social rank. Female 42 Menocal, Arabic Role, 107–10. 43 According to Jean-Charles Huchet, the masculine midons (or mi dons) instead of ma domna for women was not used exclusively in a courtly or elevated style (see L’Amour discourtois, 122, note 57).

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virginity is threatened by male seduction strategies: if the seduction succeeds, the virginity is “taken,” the rose plucked, as it were. The game of seduction is predatory in that the female loses her virginity or chastity just as the seducer’s goal is accomplished. These are limited models that do not incorporate the prospect of other kinds of interactions between two people. The courtly game exhibits certain strategies of seduction: the lover overcomes obstacles, whether a husband, a lady’s reticence, or social propriety. If courtly love poetry is destined only for noble souls capable of love, then that draws another veil of secrecy over the poem, which then requires the reader’s interpretation. Poets grappled with tensions between conflicting courtly and Christian ideals in diverse ways, and this colored the poetry they wrote. For Dante, love and virtue were compatible if the love was pure and properly expressed. In the Vita nuova, Dante is preoccupied with poetry, love, and cortesia, linked with virtue, especially concerning Beatrice. In the Commedia, Dante elevates Beatrice to the heavens, where she deals with her pilgrim-suitor sternly; thus, the adoration of the lady occurs within a divine context. If he is referring to Beatrice in Purgatorio when she appears to the pilgrim, Dante the poet subverts traditional gender by modifying the Latin grammar of a biblical quote: “Benedictus qui venis” (blessed are you who come: Purg. 30.19) identifies Christ or Beatrice as a figure for Christ, based on Psalms 117:26, “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (Vulgate: blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord), with several echoes in the Gospels.44 Dante alters the verb venire from the third- to the second-person singular (venit becomes venis). “Benedictus” designates a dignified person who commands respect, similar to the Occitan “midons” appellation of respect used by the troubadours with gender reversal. Singleton characterizes the line as remarkable and deliberately ambiguous.45 Did Dante have midons in mind when he appropriated the Latin quote for Purg. 30.19 with “Benedictus” if addressed to Beatrice (his salvation, as figura Christi)? As soon as Beatrice appears, Dante defers to her. Sponsa in “Veni, sponsa, de Libano” (Purg. 30.11), adapted from Song of Songs 4.8, is feminine and implies Beatrice. The definition of love for the ancient Romans differed from that of the troubadours and trouvères: for medieval poets, love was ideally not a matter of unbalanced excess, sexual passion, and jealous obsession that could lead to

44 The Psalms quote “Benedictus qui venit” is reproduced several times in the Gospels: e.g., Matthew 21:9 and 23:39, Luke 13:35, John 12:13 (Vulgate). John Freccero believes that Dante’s alteration of the Vulgate Latin was intentional (not due to error or copyist), and I have heard him explicate this in person. Charles Singleton emphasized Dante’s connection of Beatrice to Christ. 45 Singleton, Purgatorio, vol. 2, Commentary, Purg. 30.19, 733–34.

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madness. Occitan conceptions of mezura46 and fin’amor mitigated this and posited a noble love, a love distinct from that of Roman poets (Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus) and which ran counter to the forbidden passions of Dido or Phaedra, akin to fol’amor. Mezura incorporated the concept of virtue in the ideals of self-mastery and cortezia for the poet. According to many medieval love poets, love was a source of joy, glory, and exaltation for the lover: love ennobled him and, if the lady accepted his service and attentions, it could benefit him socially. C. S. Lewis alluded to the paradoxical quality of courtly love: “It is possible to those who are, in the old sense of the word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages that distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous.”47 We may compare this to Dante’s stilnovo conception of love inspiring the worthy (of noble heart, not necessarily of noble birth) to compose poetry on the worthy subject of love. It is not entirely congruent with the Platonic ideal excluding erotic or carnal passion from high forms of love. Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas mingled with the Petrarchan mode, Christian spirituality and sublimation of love in favor of caritas, and Ovidian and other traditions in early modern literature. One point of distinction is the treatment of carnal love. Another is the degree of seriousness or irony attributed to the matter: Ovid comes to mind as one who was not always serious, but whose medieval readers tended to read him in earnest. Today, about 425 manuscripts with Occitan texts are extant, of which ninety-five principal chansonnier manuscripts contain troubadour and trouvère songs, manuscripts produced between the thirteenth and sixteenth century:48 – – – –

Nineteen from the Occitan region Fourteen from northern France Ten from Catalonia Fifty-two from Italy (majority of manuscripts)

The majority of extant chansonnier manuscripts were produced and conserved in Italy; Italians considered troubadour lyric their poetic heritage. Concerning the reception of the troubadours in sixteenth-century France, while manuscripts of troubadour lyrics were in the hands of private collectors and monastic libraries, the book Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (Lives

46 Paolo Cherchi has written on troubadour mezura in Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love, 42–80. 47 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 2. 48 See Gale Sigal, “Troubadours, Trobairitz and Trouvères,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 1999), vol. 208, 351–66.

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of the Troubadours) by Jean de Nostradame (1507–1577), the younger brother of the physician-astrologer Michel de Nostredame or Nostradamus, was not printed until 1575, three decades after Délie. The Vies text of Nostredame contained errors, fictionalized accounts, and contrived troubadour verses.49 The late thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Occitan vidas, biographies of the troubadours, also contained historically inaccurate information. The vidas served as an indirect source for Nostredame’s Vies, mediated through Italian versions. According to the Proesme of Nostredame, recounting the lives of the troubadours recalled the past renown of Provence. The work served the interests of powerful families of the region, who could count illustrious poets among their ancestors. Jean de Nostredame’s sources included the Italian writers Bembo, Speroni, and Castiglione, as well as Vellutello’s commentary on Petrarch, which furnished ideas about the nobility of the Occitan language and mentioned troubadours by name.50 It is plausible that Scève would have read these Italian authors as well, and Vellutello’s commentaries on the poetry of Dante and Petrarch identified troubadours, besides their own lyrics alluding to them (for example, Purgatorio 26, or the Triumphus cupidinis). Italian poets esteemed the troubadours as predecessors, in part because of Dante and Petrarch, in light of their transmission via the Scuola siciliana to stilnovo poets. Their reputation as illustrious poets, along with ideas about courtly love, circulated in Italy into the sixteenth century. During Scève’s lifetime, Lyon was a crossroads of French and Italian culture, brimming with Italian merchants, booksellers, and printers. Jean de Nostredame borrowed from Italians the idea for his Vies des poètes provençaux, of which other versions had been published previously in Italy: for instance, Mario Equicola summarized troubadour doctrines of love in his Libro de natura de amore (1525). Equicola, Bembo, and Vellutello cultivated knowledge of the troubadours.51 Dante considered the troubadours poetic ancestors, as illustrated by the case of Arnaut Daniel: Arnaut appears in the Commedia as a character (Purg. 26) who addresses Dante in Occitan, and whom Guido Guinizzelli identifies as “il miglior fabbro del parlar materno” (a better fashioner of the maternal tongue: Purg. 26.117) when he presents him to Dante. Arnaut was credited with inventing the sestina metrical pattern, which Dante appropriated in Italian and mentioned in his Latin

49 Joan-Francés Courouau and Isabelle Luciani examine troubadour reception in the wake of Jean de Nostredame’s Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (1575) in La réception des troubadours en Provence: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). 50 Chabaneau and Anglade, eds. Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (Paris: Champion, 1913), 142. 51 Maria Luisa Meneghetti, “Bembo, Equicola e i trovatori,” in Prose della Volgar Lingua di Pietro Bembo, ed. S Morgana, M. Piotti, and M. Prada (Milan: Cisalpino, Istituto Editoriale Universitario, 2000), 23–35.

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treatise De vulgari eloquentia; Petrarch composed nine Italian sestine. Troubadours Bertran de Born and Sordello (Sordel) appear in Inferno 28 and Purgatorio 6–8, respectively. In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante mentions the troubadours and quotes two lines in langue d’oc of Giraut de Bornelh. However, Dante suppresses the fact that Sordello composed in Provençal rather than Italian. According to Marianne Shapiro, Dante, like Brunetto Latini, acknowledges the artistic qualities of each vernacular language: “French excels in prose and narrative romance; Provençal is the most complete instrument of lyric expression; but Italian is already the language of the sweetest and most subtle lyric poets.”52 In the Triumphi, composed in Dantesque terza rima, Petrarch lists troubadours by name in part 4 of the Triumphus cupidinis. In the Canzoniere, Petrarch quotes Arnaut Daniel (Arnaldo Daniello) in Occitan (Rvf 70.10), as Dante had done at the end of Purgatorio 26. Guittone d’Arezzo practiced the trobar clus style in his twenty courtly canzoni. The following passage of troubadour lyric is the first stanza of a canso of Guilhem de Cabestanh53 (knight from Roussillon, fl. 1212), who practiced trobar clus.54 A canso has five or six stanzas plus an envoi. This stanza illustrates the enamorament, or innamoramento: Lo jorn qu’ie.us vi, dompna, primeiramen, Quan a vos plac que.us mi laissetz vezer, Parti mon cor tot d’autre pessamen E foron ferm en vos tug mey voler: Qu’assi.m pauzetz, dompna, el cor l’enveya Ab un dous ris et ab un simpl’esguar; Mi e quant es mi fezes oblidar. (1–7)55 (The day I first saw you, my lady, when it pleased you to let me do so, my heart abandoned all other thoughts, and all my desires converged on you, for with your sweet smile and gentle look you brought my heart such longing that I forgot myself and all that was mine.)

In this stanza, the poet’s persona is struck by the sight of the lady, and his heart and will succumb to her. His desire is so strong that it overwhelms him, and he 52 Marianne Shapiro, De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 6. 53 See Arthur Langfors, Les chansons de Guilhem de Cabestanh (Paris: Champion, 1924), 18, cited in Nelli and Lavaud, Les troubadours, vol. 2, 116–17. 54 See Nelli and Lavaud, Les Troubadours, vol. 2, 634. 55 English translation by Anthony Bonner, Songs of the Troubadours (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 190.

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loses himself in the lady’s glance and smile. Henceforth he depends on her favor. The universe has narrowed to the two characters in the poem who share a clandestine pact. The poem’s argument contains topoi subsequently used by others, among them Scève. In the fifth stanza, Guilhem explicitly links love with suffering: love grants that a refined lover (seeking fin’amor) suffers to attain a reward. In dizain 16 of Délie, Scève evokes the god of love, Amour, who commands him to love his lady, Délie, whom he calls “ma Maistresse” (line 1). He writes: “Délie ingénieuse / Du premier jour m’occit de ses beaux yeux” (line 10). This accords with dizain 1, which compares the fatal power of the lady’s eyes to that of the basilisk. The lady has slain the poet with her beautiful eyes. Thus, she is associated with death, having the power to bring death to her lover. Her gaze is potent and inspires the poet’s love, just as in the troubadour stanza quoted above. The motif is common in courtly lyric. In “Aissi cum selh que baissa ’l fuelh” (Like one who lowers the leafy branch), Guilhem’s beloved resembles the most beautiful flower chosen, “sobre totas la belhazor” (the most beautiful of all: line 4), akin to the devise of Scève’s emblem 2, “entre toutes une parfaicte” (Figure 2), employing a topos denoting the superlative, the best one of all.

Figure 2: Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 2, La Lune a deux croiscentz (“Entre toutes une parfaicte”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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Dante likewise prefers Beatrice over all others (Vita nuova 6). Guilhem sets aside his past for a new era, and compares the innamoramento to a lance (“lansa d’amor,” line 20) striking the heart in a “colp” (line 23). Guilhem links love and sorrow (“Amor et Cossirier,” line 30) and evokes his suffering (“dolor,” line 28). This parallels Scève in the initial verses of Délie, in “grand fut le coup” (D 1.7) and the new existence dominated by Délie: a vita nova with the beloved lady in focus, as Beatrice becomes the central figure for Dante. In the Song of Songs, the lover’s heart is ravished by his beloved’s glance (Vulgate: “vulnerasti cor meum in uno oculorum tuorum” [you have wounded my heart with one of your eyes]: SS 4:9). Philippe Ménard examined Délie in light of courtly love.56 Ménard alluded to love and death, a major Scevian theme, in relation to the poetry of the late twelfth-century trouvère Gace Brulé, who wrote of love “en mourant vif.”57 In dizain 27, Scève writes of forgetting himself, as Guilhem de Cabestanh had done: “un doux obli de moi qui me consomme” (line 10). Like Guilhem, Scève loses himself through the encounter with the lady: Si je vois seul sans sonner mot, ne dire, Mon peu parler te demande mercy: Si je paslis accoup, comme plein d’ire, A mort me point ce mien aigre soucy: Et si pour toy je vis mort, ou transy, Las comment puis je aller, et me movoir? Amour me fait par un secret povoir Jouir d’un cœur, qui est tout tien amy, Et le nourris sans point m’appercevoir Du mal, que fait un privé ennemy. (D 244)

The poet-lover silently hopes to obtain mercy from his lady. He exhibits symptoms of love in accordance with courtly conventions: pale and quiet, between life and death (“pour toy je vis mort”), between joy and suffering in his secret love. His lady is both friend and enemy, as shown by the opposition of the rhyme amy/ennemy. Love rules over him, granting power and causing him souci. McFarlane reminds us that aigre, which modifies souci, according to the Dictionnaire Huguet, means vif (“violent”), and that privé means “gentle.” The poet-lover lives only to love, which is the origin of the secret povoir that love bestows on him. Gérard Defaux compares this dizain with Petrarch, for example, 56 Philippe Ménard, “L’inspiration courtoise dans la Délie de Maurice Scève,” in Antonio Possenti and Giulia Mastrangelo, eds. Il rinascimento a Lione, 2 vols. (Rome: Ateneo, 1988), 751–66. 57 Ménard, 753.

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“si je vois seul” with “Solo et pensoso” (Rvf 35.1), and “si je paslis” with “pallido o magro” (Rvf 264.61).58 These are also long-standing topoi of love lyric that precede Petrarch. This dizain emphasizes the lover’s feudal service to the lady: Ce mien languir multiplie la peine Du fort desir, dont tu tiens l’esperance: Mon ferme aymer t’en fait seure et certaine, Par long travail, qui donna l’asseurance. Mais toy estant fière de ma souffrance, Et qui la prens pour ton esbatement, Tu m’entretiens en ce contentement (Bien qu’il soit vain) par l’espoir, qui m’attire, Comme vivantz tout d’un sustantement Moy de t’aymer, et toy de mon martyre. (D 248)

The poet-lover languishes with false hope for an end to his desire (akin to the desire the troubadours expressed in their lyric), waiting for the lady to grant her favor. The long travail proves the lover’s loyalty, and reassures and sustains the lady in her power over him with “martyre.” The dynamic is unequal, and the lover is subordinate, bound to be faithful under any circumstances. The ferme aymer of line 3 recalls the polysemic ferme amour of Marot.59 Emblem 8 (Figure 3), whose motto “Apres long travail une fin” corresponds to D 248, reinforces the courtly ethos of the poet’s love for Délie. The poet’s “Long service” (D 438.3) presents a similar conception of love. The sacrifice is total, as the motto in emblem 17 shows: “Pour aymer souffrir ruyne” (Figure 4). Troubadours sought melhuramen (“improvement” or “advancement,” the French amélioration and Italian miglioranza being cognates), an Occitan term incorporating ethical and aesthetic categories, signifying plenitude or expansive growth. Melhuramen may be interpreted in cosmic or erotic terms; it can imply l’extase amoureuse (joi, benanansa) or la saisie de la mort.60 It was not based on a Neoplatonic schema, but on human affirmation.61 Scève was in

58 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 244, p. 286. 59 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 248, p. 291. Defaux notes in his introduction that for Scève, ferme amour incorporates eros and agape (Délie, vol. 1, p. l[50]). Marot was profoundly influenced by his reading of the Roman de la rose, and produced an edition in moyen français in 1526. See Antonio Viscardi, Le roman de la rose attribuée à Clément Marot, vol. 1, 42 sq. The wordplay inherent in ferme amour recalls the Roman de la rose. 60 Risset, Anagramme du désir, 66. 61 Risset, Anagramme du désir, 66.

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Figure 3: Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 8, La Femme qui desvuyde (“Apres long travail une fin”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

accord with the troubadours in their aspiration to attain joi, benanansa, solatz, and melhuramen in union with the beloved.62 These Occitan terms, while not synonymous, are related within the troubadour lexicon to apprehend love through poetry. Gérard Defaux called Scève “le dernier de nos grands troubadours.”63 The troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn evokes wounding and sweet suffering in love: Aquest’ amors me fer tan gen al cor d’una dousa sabor, cen vetz mor lo iorn de dolor e reviu de joi autras cen. Ben es mos mals de bel semblan,

62 Concerning the definition and usage of benanansa by Occitan troubadours, see Eliza Miruna Ghil, “Imagery and Vocabulary,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, 460–61. 63 Délie, ed. Defaux, vol. 1, xvii.

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que mais val mos mals qu’autre bes; e pois mos mals aitan bos m’es; bos er lo bes apres l’afan.64 (This love wounds me in the heart gently with a sweet savor; a hundred times a day I die of sorrow, and I revive with joy another hundred. My ill is entirely from a fair semblance, and my ill is better than any other good. And since my ill is this good to me, good will be my reward after the suffering.)

Figure 4: Maurice Scève, Délie (1544). Emblem 17, L’Hyerre & la Muraille (“Pour aymer souffrir ruyne”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Near the end of his canzone “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel), Dante develops a similar idea concerning sweet suffering and anticipation with its erotic aspect: “se ’l martiro è dolce, / la morte de’ passar ogni altro dolce” (if the suffering is sweet, the death must surpass every other sweet: 43.64–65). In the concluding line of dizain 256, Scève writes of “Toute tristesse estre veille de joye” (every sadness to precede joy).

64 Bernart de Ventadorn, “Non es meravelha s’eu chan,” stanza 4. English trans. Stephen G. Nichols, The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 132–35.

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With love-suffering and desire, there is the anticipation of joy and solace to come; deprivation gives way to fulfilment. Bernart’s stanza correlates with Scève’s dizain 65 and other dizains in Délie, with the heart’s wound, sweet suffering, and les mortz, or repeated deaths. It is distinct from Petrarch’s conception of love, marked by ambivalence, morally forbidden desire, and dissidio.

Trobar clus Hermetic, obscure and ambiguous poetry was not invented by troubadours: examples from antiquity include poets such as Pindar or Persius. Scève’s poetry has affinities with the fin’amor style of trobar clus. Trobar clus is the closed, hermetic, enigmatic Occitan style that requires exegesis by the few who must be initiated in order to decode the poetry’s meaning. It contrasts with trobar leu, lucid and accessible verse. The troubadours Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Giraut (or Guiraut) de Bornelh debated the merits of trobar clus and trobar leu in the tenso (debate poem) “Ara.m platz.”65 Trobar clus is related to trobar ric, which uses rich language and expression;66 either style may require effort for the reader to understand, though trobar clus is the more obscure. The troubadours were not generally explicit about style, nor did they all use the same terminology, and it is difficult for scholars to classify individual works. Several troubadours, such as Jaufre Rudel, Arnaut Daniel, Guilhem de Cabestanh, and Raimbaut d’Aurenga, are known for employing what we understand to be trobar clus. Trobar clus incorporates the concept that poetry ought to be a secret revealed only to an elite few who know how to appreciate it properly, because the common people would never understand it; so runs Raimbaut’s argument. In the same tenso, the use of a senhal (a sign or secret name) is made for Raimbaut: Linhaure or Lignaura.67 How is this framework relevant for Scève’s poetry? The dizains of Délie have been considered obscure, ambiguous, and hermetic, almost from the time of publication, and since Pasquier mentioned Scève in his Recherches de la France (1560–1621). These attributes recur in scholarship on Scève. The dizain structure is architecturally closed, hermetic, and self-contained. Interpretation is contingent on the reader’s ability to decode the poem, and understanding mutates with time, linguistic evolution, and context. Poetry purged of ambiguity can

65 Sarah Spence discusses trobar clus and cites the full tenso in “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, 173–75. 66 René Nelli and René Lavaud, Les Troubadours, vol. 2, pp. 633–34. 67 René Nelli believed the senhal originated with the Arabs. See L’Érotique des troubadours, vol. 1, 183, cited in Jean-Charles Huchet, L’Amour discourtois, 122, note 56.

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be less intriguing, if explicit and self-evident.68 Thomas Greene notes, “Poems are commonly located near the border of the ineffable.”69 In a visual analogy, the technique sfumato in Renaissance painting blurs lines along color and shade boundaries, creating the effect of depth, particularly in its depiction of eyes. The accomplished use of linguistic ambiguity in poetry evokes profound ideas and emotions, without explicating them openly. The reader engages in the paradoxical act of sharing the secret through recognizing clues and generating meaning. Scève has been compared with Mallarmé, another famously hermetic poet with an attitude similar to that of Raimbaut concerning the poetry’s destinataire: that it be understood only by the few who know. In the Commedia, Dante the pilgrim recounts that his guide Virgil revealed hidden knowledge to him: “mi mise dentro a le segrete cose” (he introduced me into the secret things: Inf. 3.21). In the Vita nuova and Commedia, Dante does not reveal everything he experiences. According to Jerry C. Nash, Scève’s difficult language represents not a barrier but a stage for the reader to pass through, moving from fragmentation to reintegration in the harmonious order of the universe.70 In his poetic treatise Bref sommaire (1531), Guillaume Télin emphasized the vatic qualities of poets, stating, “[L]’office des poetes est de bailler les choses convertement et faindre soubz autre semblance et figure.”71 In fairness to Scève, this offers a model for understanding Délie in accordance with early modern literary modes. The topos of the poet as vates was ancient; Ovid referred to Tibullus as vates (Amores 3.9, line 5). The name Délie has been decoded in several ways: as a platonic reference, an anagram for l’idée; as Delia, the moon; as a form of the verb délier, to untie, unbind; and as a senhal for Pernette du Guillet, Scève’s pupil who might have had an affair with him. The poet’s persona is linked to Délie. The use of coded or secret language, including the senhal, is common to troubadours, Scève, and Petrarch; Dante’s use of “screen” ladies (“schermo de la veritade”: Vita nuova 5.3) to disguise the identity of his true beloved is similar. Secrecy in amorous matters is essential to the courtly dynamic, and discretion is a duty, as part of fidelity. Scève uses devises such as “non si non là” and “souffrir non souffrir,” which have 68 See, e.g., William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), 3rd ed. (London: Pimlico, 2004). Jan Ziolkowski has written on obscurity in medieval Latin literature, with attention to classical rhetoric and Augustine; see “Obscure styles in Medieval Literature,” Mediaevalia 19 (1996), pp. 101–70. 69 Thomas Greene, “Rescue from the Abyss: Scève’s Dizain 378,” in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: Modern Language Association, 1986), 16. 70 See François Rigolot, who cites Nash in “Cinq paroles intelligibles: À propos de Scève l’Obscur,” in A Scève Celebration, p. 56 and note 6; Nash, The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle (1991). 71 Quoted in I. D. McFarlane, A Literary History of France: Renaissance France, 1470–1589 (London: Ernest Benn, 1974), p. 138 and note 56.

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generated diverse interpretations. Jacqueline Risset has pointed out that the use of devises is common to the troubadours as well, such as the “Mesjau-no-jausitz” (je suis joyeux–non joyeux) of Bernart de Ventadorn.72 The devises enhance the enigmatic quality of Scève’s work. Scève’s poetry echoes courtly love tradition on several levels: topoi concerning praise of the beloved, the suffering of the loyal poet who vows to be her vassal, the idealization of the dame, and the importance of l’oeil and le regard,73 both the poet’s gaze upon the lady, a contemplation that compels him to love her, and the power of the lady’s gaze. The innamoramento is sudden and overwhelming. The non-narrative lyric pattern of repeating certain themes, the waiting in secret and solitude, and links between poetry and music figure in Scève’s poetry.74

Union in love Medieval love poets were preoccupied with the relation between human and divine love, as Peter Dronke noted.75 Dronke cites al-Farabi (ca. 875–950), who wrote commentaries on Plato’s Republic and Laws,76 concerning the idea of union with the active intellect in which man was fulfilled through finding his essential nature. Though al-Farabi disagreed with the Plotinian idea of mystical union with the One, for him, the Neoplatonic One, linked to the Aristotelian First Cause, still represented the highest level in his cosmic hierarchy of pure intelligences. Such union was not a duality or exclusion of physical, corruptible, material existence, but true unity that incorporated earthly experience.77 For love poets, the idea of unity consisting in the divine union of many represented a solution to the problem of human versus divine love: the discrepancy between human and divine could be accommodated through unity-in-diversity. In Plato’s Timaeus, available in incomplete Latin translation from the twelfth

72 See Risset, Anagramme du désir, p. 64 and note 65. 73 Cf. Andreas Capellanus, the Roman de la rose, etc. 74 Troubadours sang their compositions in musical performance. Concerning Scève, theoretical and symbolic aspects are analyzed by James Helgeson in Harmonie divine et subjectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (Geneva: Droz, 2001). By the early sixteenth century in France, music and poetry were considered distinct. 75 See Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp. 74–75. Dronke quotes a passage from a twelfth-century Latin translation of al-Farabi’s De intellectu et Intellecto. 76 Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 109. 77 Dronke, Medieval Latin, vol. 1, 74.

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century, the anima mundi mediated between unity and diversity. The candida rosa in Dante’s Paradiso78 was a culmination with the blessed figures assembled in Paradise. Besides being Dante’s beloved lady in accordance with courtly tradition, Beatrice also exalted and guided the poet, leading him to God. This contrasts with Petrarch’s renunciation of his love for Laura in the Canzoniere; for him, there was no ultimate union or ecstasy with Laura, nor with the divine. Jacqueline Risset has emphasized the cosmic aspect of love shared by Lyonnais poets, including Scève, and Dante and the stilnovo.79 Scève writes in the closing dizain of Délie: “Aussi je voy bien peu de difference / Entre l’ardeur, qui noz cœurs poursuivra, / Et la vertu” (D 449.5–7). Divine purity is fused with earthly human desire, which figure in Scève’s conception of love with Délie. Giuseppe Mazzotta has written of Dante’s principle for his iteration of stilnovo poetry, inspired by love, that “a passion can become a virtue,”80 which is consistent with Scève but not with Petrarch or Cavalcanti. The two hearts pursued by ardeur recall Dante’s dream vision in the Vita nuova in which the lover’s heart is associated with ardor: Beatrice is compelled to consume Dante’s flaming heart under the auspices of the god of love, thereby creating a bond between them. The yearning for the beloved is associated with the yearning for divine union. This idea is found in Sufi writings as well, along with figurative language about love including the mirror, passage through fire, alchemical transformation into gold, and the intertwined themes of love and death.81

78 On the symbolism of Dante’s Rose, see Mario Apollonio, “Candida rosa,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 2, pp. 786–87; see also Giuseppe Di Scipio, The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso (Ravenna: Longo, 1984). 79 Risset, Anagramme du désir, 40. 80 Giuseppe Mazzotta, Reading Dante (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 165. 81 In Sufi tradition, a man who falls in love with a woman or girl is interpreted in stories and poetry (e.g., in allusions to “the beloved”) as portraying an initial stage of the yearning for God. Analogies occur with the Platonic hierarchy of types of love in Plato’s Symposium, and in Ficino’s commentary De amore. Human union is understood to reflect divine union, and may be considered a stage on the path. Longing for the human, earthly beloved (one person for another) is really the longing for the Eternal Beloved. Human love is preparation or training for divine love. Sufi mystics and poets articulated desire for union using the language of human love (see, e.g., Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975, p. 5). The seeker must undergo a process of purification in order to approach the divine (Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 134). In a tale by the twelfth-century Persian mystical poet and Sufi master Fariduddin Attar (born ca. 1136), a pious Sufi teacher named San’an falls madly in love with a much younger Christian girl who spurns him. After he renounces his religion and all social convention, a voice tells him, “One must be burned in the fire of love to be worthy of seeing the Eternal Beloved. Name and position have no value in the creed of Love. Before one can behold the Truth, the dust of existence must be cleansed from the mirror of the soul. Only

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According to Dronke, concepts like the anima mundi provided a means for medieval love poets to attain transfiguration through their love, rather than being rejected: sexual fulfilment represented a worthwhile objective, not a morally forbidden or sinful one. In the Roman de la rose, Jean de Meun writes that without the “deliz qui les atrait,” people would not reproduce and preserve nature’s creation through regeneration.82 The passage argues that nature is good, and sex and reproduction are part of nature, with the intent to render sexual union acceptable and not immoral. Jean de Meun later presents the idea of sexual fulfilment not being banned from paradise, articulated by Genius, li prestres (the priest) of the goddess Nature (vv. 16283 sq.).

then can one see the reflection of the True Beloved in the mirror.” See Mojdeh Bayat and Mohammad Ali Jamnia, Tales from the Land of the Sufis (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 48–80. Ibn ’Arabi (1165–1241) wrote love verses to a beautiful Persian lady he met at Mecca while on the hajj pilgrimage, and he later interpreted his own verses in a mystical sense; the device was common among Sufi poets (Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 264). Images of lovers (or their hearts) burning in the fire of love is a topos in Turkish and Persian poems, according to Schimmel: see I am Wind, You Are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), 177. Sufi poets employ alchemical metaphors of turning base metals into pure gold (ibid., 177). A pseudonym for Rumi was Salahuddin, meaning goldsmith (ibid., 178). The poet is a fabbro, as Dante indicated. Obedience through love implies complete surrender to the Beloved according to the Sufis, and death means the annihilation of individual qualities, the lifting of the veil (Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 135). For this reason, Sufi mystics like Hallaj welcomed death, because it implied reunion with God. There are interesting parallels with love poetry of troubadour and stilnovo poets, Dante, and Scève. On conceptions of mystical union, see Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1989). Sufi ideas about love circulated in al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula, and it is intriguing to compare them to fin’amor, although direct influence seems implausible. In The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (1987), Menocal compared the palinode condemning courtly love in the Tawq alHamāma (French: Le collier de la colombe; English: The Dove’s Neck-Ring or Ring of the Dove) of Ibn Hazm (994–1064) (his name previously transliterated as Abenhazam or Aben Hazam) of Córdoba, with the palinode of Andreas Capellanus in the third part of his treatise on love. Menocal suggested that muwashshahat (strophic poetry) of al-Andalus be considered alongside troubadour poetry; see Arabic Role, 107–11. Briffault (1945, 1965) had previously discussed Ibn Hazm’s treatise in relation to subsequent medieval love doctrines. However, J. A. Abu-Haidar dismissed a direct philological filiation between troubadour love lyric and Arabic literature of al-Andalus, in Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon, 2001, pp. 171–234). Abu-Haidar found that the origins, themes and vocabulary of each tradition were disparate, neither giving rise to the other. 82 Dronke quotes the passage from the Roman de la rose, lines 4403–20 (in the 1992 edition of Armand Strubel, based on BN 12786 and BN 378, it is lines 4399–4416, with the “deliz” line at 4416). Jean de Meun qualifies the human race as “estre devin.” See Dronke, Medieval Latin, vol. 1, p. 81.

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The Roman de la rose recounts the elaborate conquest of the lover for his rose, the allegorical representation of the demoiselle and her sex. In the first part, Guillaume de Lorris sets forth the courtly ideal of the lover and his mission of seduction—which initially appears unlikely—as a plot device. The second, much longer portion of Jean de Meun concludes with the lover plucking the rose with the aid of Venus, whose well-aimed arrow represents desire kindled within the maiden’s body by the lover’s advances. Love (that is, sexual desire) as conceived in the Roman de la rose was not consistently subjected to moral condemnation. Although the poem might have been considered scandalous for this reason, such themes were couched in allegory, thereby purporting to be something other than what they were: in the second part, for instance, an elaborate pilgrimage to access holy relics occurs, preceded by a series of lengthy speeches and a military siege. Notwithstanding ecclesiastical views concerning sexuality, evocations of the erotic impulse emerged in lyric and narrative: disguised, sublimated, satirized, subtly evoked, molded into something acceptable, or acknowledged outright. Courtly love undermined official arrangements of marriage and social status, not only with respect to the suitor’s potential disregard for legitimate marital arrangements but also for the poet’s secret pursuit of a lady and potential advancement in status. This recalls de Rougemont’s distinction between feudal and courtly code. The secret, which, ironically, is announced when articulated in poetry, is a conceit: there is no secret when one sings openly to an audience about one’s beloved, although the lady’s identity could be concealed. The poetry’s subsequent publication in manuscript and print further belied the conventional secret. The poet was engaged in playful hiding and disclosure, as in a game. Prior to the publication of Délie, Scève participated in the poetic “competition” of blasons, apparently organized by Clément Marot; Scève prevailed in 1536 with his “Blason du sourcil,” a subtle example within a frequently licentious genre that reveals Scève’s poetic independence.83 The blasons satirized love poetry, especially the contre-blason, which denigrated women’s body parts. The blasons constituted a parodic manifestation of the poet’s fixation on parts of the woman’s body, without the moral and philosophical apparatus involving love and virtue. Scève’s dizain below contains parallels with the Roman de la rose: Peu s’en falloit, encores peu s’en fault, Que la Raison asses mollement tendre Ne prenne, apres long spasme, grand deffault, Tant foible veult contre le Sens contendre.

83 See Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 87–93. In Ferrara, Renée de France and Marot judged the blason contest. Hunkeler discusses “anatomical” blasons and Scève in Vif du sens, chap. 2, esp. 80–100.

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Lequel voulant ses grandz forces estendre (Aydé d’Amour) la vainct tout oultrément. Ne pouvant donc le convaincre aultrement, Je luy complais un peu, puis l’adoulcis De propos sainctz.84 Mais quoy? plus tendrement Je l’amollis, et plus je l’endurcis. (D 420)

This dizain presents the futile struggle within the poet-lover between reason and the senses, the subtext being a desire for Délie that defies reason. Raison and Sens are allegorical figures engaged in battle, but Sens easily dominates with the support of Amour. The poet attempts to satisfy reason with the use of “propos sainctz,” a polysemic religious reference. A sort of microcosmic psychomachia compressed into a brief poem, this dizain is inscribed in the allegorical tradition of the Roman de la rose, after the allegorical poem Psychomachia (“Battle for the Soul”) by the Christian-Latin poet Prudentius (348–ca. 405 CE), which describes the war between virtues and vices. In the Roman de la rose, as in dizain 420, the allegorical figure of Raison is defeated, love triumphs, and the lover pursues the object of his desire. In dizain 420, a sexual undercurrent pervades the verses: with the terms long spasme and prendre, the opposition between the verbs amollir and endurcir, and the adverbs tendrement and mollement. It is as if Sens seduces Raison and savors the conquest, perhaps as Scève wanted to vanquish Délie as she did him. As a devoted courtly lover, Scève attests in numerous dizains to Délie’s triumph over him. At the end of the second part of the Roman de la rose, the lover triumphs with the aid of both Amour and Venus, who shoots the flaming arrow at the quasi-hidden meurtrière placed there by nature between the towers representing the young woman’s thighs. Thus, Venus triumphs over fear and shame in the allegorical battle scene by bringing forth desire in the maiden’s body.85 The second part of the Roman de la rose contains courtly and anti-courtly passages; Jean de Meun’s long continuation brings the quest to a conclusion. The Canzoniere also evoked the lover’s desire and struggle between reason and passion. The ethos of Christian moral disapproval concerning erotic love is defeated through argument in Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la rose. This Christian ethos figures in the Canzoniere and Secretum, diverging from the

84 Defaux substitutes “propos fainctz” for sainctz in D 420.9, altering the meaning. 85 Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel, based on mss. BN 12786 and BN 378, vv. 20791 sq. Normally, an archière or meurtrière is intended for the castle’s defenders to shoot arrows or projectiles outward against assailants or invaders, but this is reversed with Venus shooting the brandon from the outside into it, aiming carefully for the locus of vulnerability with her archer’s skill (“Puis avise comme bonne archier / Par une petitete archiere,” vv. 20795–6). The allegory of sexual arousal is evident.

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Roman de la rose and courtly codes of love. Defaux compares dizain 420 to Petrarch’s Rvf 211, with the pairing of sens and raison: “regnano i sensi, et la ragion è morta” [the senses govern, and reason is dead] (line 7). There is little interaction between Laura and Petrarch as literary characters, whereas there are poetic encounters between Scève and Délie. In both poems, Rvf 211 and D 420, a struggle ensues between reason and the senses. In sonnet Rvf 211, the poet’s moral stance is reflected in Hope, which is deemed treacherous and deceitful: Voglia mi sprona, Amor mi guida et scorge, Piacer mi tira, Usanza mi trasporta, Speranza mi lusinga et riconforta et la man destra al cor già stanco porge; e ’l misero la prende et non s’accorge di nostra cieca et disleale scorta: regnano i sensi et la ragion è morta; de l’un vago desio l’altro risorge. Vertute, Honor, Bellezza, atto gentile, dolci parole ai be’ rami n’àn giunto ove soavemente il cor s’invesca. Mille trecento ventisette, a punto su l’ora prima, il dì sesto aprile, nel laberinto intrai, né veggio ond’ esca. (Rvf 211) (Desire spurs me, Love guides and escorts me, Pleasure draws me, Habit carries me away; Hope entices and encourages me and reaches out his right hand to my weary heart, and my wretched heart grasps it and does not see how blind and treacherous this guide of ours is; the senses govern and reason is dead; and one yearning desire is born after another. Virtue, honor, beauty, gentle bearing, sweet words brought us to the lovely branches, that my heart may be sweetly enlimed. One thousand three hundred twentyseven, exactly at the first hour of the sixth day of April, I entered the labyrinth, nor do I see where I may get out of it.)86

At first, this sonnet appears to exude courtly values: the lady possesses the attributes of vertute, onora, bellezza, and gentle, noble demeanor, which the poet-persona praises. He commemorates the date he saw Laura, who is not named. But certain vocabulary in the sonnet contradicts this courtly veneer: a pagan labyrinth is not pleasant, for the monstrous and lethal Minotaur lurks inside, and the hero can escape only by slaying it. A Christian labyrinth would not lead to Laura, but to God or to salvation through penance. Misero, cieca, disleale: these terms, like laberinto, convey fear, doubt, and ambivalence. Where

86 English translations of Petrarch’s Canzoniere are by Robert Durling (1976).

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the senses reign, Petrarch’s persona is unhappy and unfulfilled; he does not exult in them or welcome them, since spiritual joy is morally permissible, but obsessive, passionate, personal love is not. Hope is identified as treacherous and deceptive, not a laudable attribute or virtue. This departs from courtly code, for a faithful, eager, waiting lover would not tend to express such bitter, ambivalent sentiments about his objective in his poetry. Let us compare Petrarch’s sonnet Rvf 211 with the following Scevian dizain: D’elle puis dire, et ce sans rien mentir, Qu’ell’ a en soy je ne sçay quoy de beau, Qui remplit l’oeil, et qui se fait sentir, Au fond du coeur par un desir noveau, Troublant à tous le sens, et le cerveau, Voire et qui l’ordre à la raison efface. (D 410.1–6)

This dizain presents the motif of reason defeated by love in its opposition of sens and raison. A joyous celebration of the lady’s beauty recalls troubadour and stilnovo poetry. The disturbance to the mind and senses recalls Cavalcanti’s conception of love, and that of the troubadours. Dizain 65 also presents erotic aspects: Continuant toy, le bien de mon mal, A t’exercer, comme mal de mon bien: J’ay observé pour veoir, ou bien, ou mal, Si mon service en toy militoit bien. Mais bien congneus appertement combien Mal j’adorois tes premieres faveurs. Car, savourant le jus de tes saveurs Plus doulx asses, que Succre de Madere, je creuz, et croy encor tes deffameurs, Tant me tient sien l’espoir, qui trop m’adhere. (D 65)

This dizain opens with wordplay reminiscent of the rhétoriqueurs: the inversions “bien de mon mal” and “mal de mon bien” present the topos of paradoxical love causing pleasure and pain, comparable to the troubadour love-illness whose cure is dispensed by the beloved. The binaries “bien” and “mal” are central in this dizain, as coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites).87 The sweetness and favors dispensed by the lady contrast with the pain she causes. The lady whom Scève addresses with the intimate “tu” pronoun perturbs him, yet she functions as a source of bien for the poet-lover. His love is unrequited, but hope clings to him, even in excess. The lady represents both illness and cure for him (a fin’amor topos). She could bring him joy and good things, 87 Defaux, Délie, note to D 65.

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“bien,” but she chooses instead to bring him “mal.” The poet serves her, hoping for favors, and seeks mercy. The dizain also takes on an erotic tone with “mon service en toy” and “savourant le jus de tes saveurs.” Although the poet-lover experiences regret since the subsequent absence of his beloved is difficult to bear, he longs for the sweetness of previous encounters with Délie, while the true nature of those encounters remains hidden from the reader. Scève expresses his courtly devotion to Délie: Celle pour qui je metz sens, et estude A bien servir, m’a dit en ceste sorte: Tu voys asses, que la grand servitude, Où l’on me tient, me rend en ce poinct morte. Je pense donc, puis qu’elle tient si forte La peine, qu’a le sien corps seulement, Qu’elle croira, que mon entendement, Qui pour elle a coeur, et corps asservy, Me fera dire estre serf doublement, Et qu’en servant j’ay amour deservy. (D 142)

Scève indicates his total devotion to Délie: he must faithfully serve the Dame (here the master is a dompna or domina). Scève uses the words “honneur” and “seigneurie” (D 146.1–2) in relation to Délie. His faithful service renders him worthy, and he reasons that he deserves the reward of her favors, exactly according to the courtly dynamic; Scève plays on the etymology of serf/servant and asservy/deservy to claim double service, to coeur and corps: he provides, but also he needs the provision of love. The pairings emphasize the double service: sens/étude, coeur/corps, and servant/deservy. The troubadours’ conception of love diverged from classical definitions of love in Greek and Roman antiquity: for the ancients, love was a dangerous, irrational passion that muddled the mind, whereas the philosophical ideals were calm equilibrium, reason, and self-mastery. Passions were disruptive and troublesome, and could lead to indignity, degradation, and worse; for instance, Plato’s Phaedrus illustrates the contrast with the allegory of the charioteer’s horses (246a sq.). Obsessive love, particularly forbidden love, could destroy both men and women. Plato’s descriptions of exalted love in the Symposium excluded erotic desire and sex, complex and potentially disturbing, irrational aspects of human love, in favor of the metaphysical union of souls. Vergil88 acknowledged

88 “Vergil” throughout refers to Publius Vergilius Maro, author of the Aeneid and other Latin works. “Virgil” refers to the same author as the literary character Virgilio, the guide of Dante the pilgrim in the Commedia.

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that love’s power was incontrovertible: “omnia vincit amor: et nos cedamus Amori” (love conquers all; let us also yield to love: Eclogue 10.69). This was cited in the Roman de la rose by Courtoisie: “Virgiles neïs le conferme / [. . .] / “Amours vaint tout” i trouverez, / “Et nous la devons recevoir” (vv. 21333, 21336–37).89 Thus, Vergil’s Roman auctoritas was appropriated to endorse a principle of medieval courtly love. For the troubadours, love exalted through adoration of a beloved lady, despite the suffering and longing it caused. Lustful passion (fol’amor, as opposed to fin’amor) was an irresistible force of nature that most could not withstand, as illustrated in the fabliaux and Boccaccio’s vernacular writings. Dante identified different types of love in the Commedia, alluding to folle amore in Paradiso 8.2. In the Roman de la rose, the amorous (sexual) impulse was connected to nature, as part of the rhythms of creation. Christian views on sex colored definitions of love: Charles Singleton wrote, “the love which [troubadour] poetry celebrated stood judged and condemned . . . by Christian ideas.”90 According to Maurice Valency, the stilnovo poets (and Petrarch) produced poetry that was more private, elitist, and exclusive than that of the troubadours.91 The stilnovo poet praises the lady in more hyperbolic terms than the troubadour poet, whose persona tends to be more timid. Cavalcanti declares that mezura is useless against the power of love: “solo Amor mi sforza, / contra cui non val forza–né misura” (1.43–44).92 Valency comments, “To the fever of the flesh succeeded the fever of the mind . . . It was perhaps inevitable that the stilnovist poets in their attempt to treat their subject matter with the calm rationality of the philosopher should at once fall into the sphere of the mystic.”93 We have reviewed courtly love as an important part of the background for comparing Scève’s Délie and Dante’s poetry, including the Occitan trobar clus style. Scève constitutes a courtly love poet in this context. Courtly love was a locus for unresolved tension between the conflicting forces of erotic passion and moral virtue. As ideology, courtly love underpins many literary texts dealing with love from the twelfth century onward, in diverse manifestations: Andreas Capellanus’s treatise on courtly love, De arte honeste amandi; the first part of the Roman de la rose; and the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and others. The legends of Tristan and Lancelot explore adulterous, forbidden love in a context tinged with

89 Jean de Meun attributes this line (v. 21335) to the Bucoliques of Vergil, rather than to Eclogue 10. 90 Charles Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 3. 91 Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love, 234–35. 92 Quoted in Valency, 235, from Cavalcanti’s poem “Fresca rosa novella.” 93 Valency, 235.

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feudal principles of loyalty. Philosophical and medical definitions of love include illness whose only cure is the lady’s favors.94 Definitions of moral virtue were usually aligned with the church’s position on sexual passion as dangerous, evil, and destructive. Erotic passion could constitute a threat to social stability and the institution of marriage. The Roman de la rose nonetheless glorifies and justifies the erotic. Courtly themes framed the Roman de la rose, though the second part subverted them through anti-courtly discourse (for example, that of Genius, vv. 19509–20671), passages denouncing marriage, misogynistic passages, and in the poem’s conclusion, the long-sought plucking of the rose. The subsequent publication of the Vies of Jean de Nostredame in 1575 on the Occitan troubadours confirms the endurance of the troubadour legacy and constitutes a revival in France. This is borne out by the transmission of ideas and themes encompassing the extensive legacy of courtly love conventions. The chain is established in regions of France and Italy: from the troubadours to the Scuola siciliana to the stilnovo poets whence Dante and Petrarch emerge, and through Scève’s reception of Dante and Petrarch.

94 For a summary of medical diagnoses of love as illness, see Marc Carnel, Le sang embaumé des roses (Geneva: Droz, 2004); see also Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, eds., Eros and Anteros: The Medical Traditions of Love in the Renaissance (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992).

3 Scève, Ficino, Cavalcanti: “Parfeit un corps en sa parfection” The influence of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and his friend and rival Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1259–ca. 1300) is woven into Marsilio Ficino’s theory of love, in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium.1 The Florentine priest Ficino (1433–1499) translated the Symposium into Latin between 1462 and 1468, and composed his treatise De amore in 1467, revising it in 1474. Using Ficino’s views on love as a framework, we will compare certain elements common to the lyric poetry of Cavalcanti and Scève: the theme of death, spiriti, and in Scève and Dante, virtue. The shadow of Dante lurks in the Neoplatonic background of Maurice Scève’s poetry because Ficino’s treatise De amore is indebted to Dante’s Convivio, and Sperone Speroni’s reading of Ficino emerges in his Dialoghi. It was probably Cristoforo Landino, the Florentine Neoplatonist commentator of the Commedia, who suggested that Ficino use the Convivio as a model.2 Dante discusses virtue and love in the Convivio, and Ficino adopts his view that intellectual virtues are superior to moral ones, although moral virtues are better known; Ficino’s explanation of human individuation is also similar to Dante’s.3 Several of Ficino’s Florentine colleagues in the Accademia besides Landino were active Dantists.4 The Florentine circle of Platonists admired Dante, but they sought Platonic concepts in Dante’s writings, thus misunderstanding him while contributing to his renown.5 Both the Convivio and De amore, following Plato’s Symposium, described a gathering in the name of philosophy to discuss the cosmic nature and meaning of love. Dante cited Plato by name (as “Plato” or “Platone”) fifteen times in the Convivio, although the text of the Symposium would not be available in Latin until Ficino translated it from the Greek, long after Dante’s death. Dante and Petrarch were familiar with Plato only indirectly, through the mediation of the available texts of Seneca, Cicero, Paul, Augustine, and Latin Neoplatonists such as Servius, Macrobius, and Boethius (whose De consolatione philosophiae served as a model

1 A version of this chapter was published in French as “La Délie de Maurice Scève et le fond poétique italien du Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon [De amore] de Marsile Ficin,” in Le Verger 3 (December 2012). 2 Sears Jayne, ed. and trans., A Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, 11. 3 Jayne, 28, note 6. 4 Jayne, 28, note 6. 5 See Festugière, “Dante et Marsile Ficin,” in Bulletin du Jubilé, Comité français catholique pour la célébration du sixième centenaire de la mort de Dante Alighieri (Paris: L’Art Catholique, 1921–1922), vol. 5, pp. 535–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-004

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for Dante’s Convivio). Plato’s Timaeus6 was available in Dante’s time in the partial Latin translation of Calcidius, and Dante cited it in the Convivio. Besides Plato’s Symposium viewed through the lens of Plotinus’s interpretation, the chief models for Ficino’s De amore were drawn from Dante and Cavalcanti; it was conventional before Ficino’s time to write one’s own treatise in the form of a commentary on some other work.7 De amore became the model for the Renaissance genre of the trattato d’amore, the treatise on love. In the treatise, Ficino calls Cavalcanti a philosopher. In 1527, the anthology of Tuscan poets, which included Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega,” was published in Florence by Bernardo di Giunta, under the title Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani in dieci libri raccolte (Sonnets and songs of various antique Tuscan authors in ten books). This book, and commentators on Dante, contributed to the transmission of Cavalcanti’s poetry in the sixteenth century.8 The giuntina anthology contained poems also printed in the 1545 Lyon edition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Triumphi dedicated to Scève by Jean de Tournes.9 The poems constitute the Appendix Aldina (1514), including stilnovo incipits inserted in Rvf 70.10 Cavalcanti’s poetry was known to Scève.

Neoplatonism as poetic influence Definitions of Platonism and Neoplatonism are complex.11 Platonism refers to the doctrines of Plato (ca. 427–ca. 347 BCE) and his Academy, which later blended with Stoic terminology in the early first century BCE. Middle Platonism (Antiochus to Numenius) gave rise to Plotinus and Neoplatonism. Early and Middle Platonism, as well as Neoplatonism, were predicated on close readings of Plato’s texts and commentaries. Neoplatonism emphasized metaphysics and ethics, and comprised modification and systematization: for instance,

6 An incomplete Latin translation and commentary by Calcidius. 7 Jayne, 11. 8 Lowry Nelson, The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, xxxii. 9 Il Petrarca (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1545), 16mo, with woodcuts. It includes Sonetti e canzoni, Trionfi, certain stilnovo poems, and Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega. 10 See Hunkeler’s article, “Les ‘déviations’ de l’esprit,” 62–63. See also Vif du sens, 196–97. 11 On Platonism and Neoplatonism, see articles on “Plato,” “Platonism,” and “Neoplatonism” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy respectively: www. rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/plato-427-347-bc/v-2 and www.rep.routledge.com/ar ticles/thematic/platonism-early-and-middle/ and www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/neo platonism/v-1 and plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ and plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/ and plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoplatonism.

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the emphasis on the hierarchical structure of the soul’s spiritual ascent by thinkers including Plotinus and Proclus. During the Renaissance, the distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism was not recognized, and Ficino relied upon Plotinus as a faithful interpreter of Plato’s philosophy. In De amore, Ficino was not simply reproducing Plato’s conception of love from the Symposium, but the Neoplatonic interpretation of that conception, especially from Enneads III.5, which Ficino translated and commented.12 Plato’s texts do not form a closed, logical system or a consistent doctrine, yet certain themes recur, such as the dualism between the senses and the intelligible, between the body and the soul, and between physicality and ideal forms that cannot be perceived directly through the senses. The ancient duality between body and soul found in Plato’s writings (as well as the Plotinian trinity with the unknowable godhead) was adopted by Christian thinkers and has informed subsequent Western thought. Paradoxically, for Plato, the immaterial forms are considered more real than their physical manifestations, which are imperfect incarnations of the models they imitate. At the intersection of philosophy and poetry, we find the contemplation of higher, extraordinary states, which may lead to a philosophical reflection on the attributes of the soul and ideas (forms). In this respect, Platonism correlates with the writing of poetry, which requires an inner mental and emotional life, usually demanding a laborious process of composition, and until the modern era, assimilation into a recognizable tradition (against which the surrealists and others rebelled) for poetic production.13 Contrary to this model of poetry composition, divinely inspired frenzy, also mentioned in Plato (in the Symposium, Ion, Phaedrus, and Laws) was transmitted as furor poeticus, a state only the true poet could attain. The Neoplatonist Landino declared that Dante was inspired by “divino furore” (divine furor).14 The experience of being in love, like poetic inspiration by the muses, constituted a higher state. Although Platonism (and Neoplatonism) did not necessarily inspire love poetry, their principles relating to transcendent states, wisdom, friendship, love, and the nature of the soul appealed to early modern writers of love poetry and mystical poetry, because they were consistent with the

12 Al Wolters, “Ficino and Plotinus’ ‘Treatise on Eros,’” in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, 189. 13 Plato banned poets from the Republic for what he viewed as their corrupting and distorting influence. However, Plotinus argued that artistic (including poetic) imitation transcends the world of appearances and imitates divine truth directly (O. B. Hardison, “Platonism and Poetry,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd ed.; article not in fourth edition). 14 See Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” 46. It is found in a section of Landino’s proemio al commento dantesco devoted to Dante’s “furore divino.”

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yearning for exaltation and the desire for union that love poetry frequently expressed, whether the yearning was directed toward a person or a divine entity. Plato’s interest in elaborate myths as vehicles for philosophical ideas (for example, the cave in Republic VII, or the soul’s chariot in Phaedrus) helps to account for the Neoplatonists’ intense development of allegorical approaches to literary and philosophical texts, such as correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm.15 Diverse conceptions of love are set forth by the speakers in Plato’s Symposium, among them homosexual desire (Alcibiades toward Socrates, and the desire of men for boys). Ficino, the Christian priest who coined the expression “Platonic love,”16 does not include carnal desire in his definition of exalted love that approaches the divine. Neoplatonic thought influenced Petrarchist and other Renaissance poetry, merging with the courtly lyric tradition and its idealizing tendencies. A. J. Festugière writes, “À ce langage amoureux dérivé des chansons courtoises correspond maintenant une philosophie [qui remonte à] Platon.”17 Ficino’s theory of love influenced Marguerite de Navarre, Antoine Héroët, and others in France when French translations of Ficino’s De amore appeared by Symphorien Champier (1503) and Gilles Corrozet (1542) in incomplete translations, and later, in 1546, when the complete treatise by Jean de la Haye appeared.18 One example of the crosscurrents of Neoplatonism and courtly lyric, evident in Ficino’s De amore, and subsequently in Scève’s Délie, is Ficino’s description of the power of sight in the phenomenon of falling in love (De amore II, 6; II, 7). Plotinus names the soul’s perception in love (horasis or “seeing”), and the purpose is spiritual union in beauty, as Plato has Diotima explain to Socrates. Plotinus writes: Love [as Hypostasis] . . . exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first; before it becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight; . . . for desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it (Enneads III, 5, 2).19

In this passage, sight is understood both in its literal sense and as a metaphor for the perception of inner beauty. In Plato, Plotinus, and Ficino, the sight of

15 Robert Durling, “Neoplatonism,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 641. 16 See Festugière, La philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin, chap. 2, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, chap. 3, “Ficino,” esp. 47. 17 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 3. 18 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 28. 19 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna.

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the beloved is not characterized as a potentially destructive “accident,” as Cavalcanti calls it in “Donna me prega” (cited infra). Nor is it described as a “grand coup” like a deadly arrow, or as the mythical basilisk’s piercing gaze as in Scève’s Délie: the latter might have been borrowed from a line of Marot, or from La belle dame sans mercy of Alain de Chartier.20 Scève writes that the sight penetrates “en l’Ame de mon Ame” (D 1.6), consistent with a Neoplatonic context; the line has been identified with a passage in the Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of Love; Rome, 1535) of Leone Ebreo (Léon Hébreu, or Leon Yehuda Abravanel).21 Dizains 1 and 13 begin with l’oeil, emphasizing the power of sight. Dizain 424 mentions the eyes, virtue, beauty, body, and soul, all of which are essential Neoplatonic elements. Let us examine the poem’s Neoplatonic aspects: De corps tresbelle et d’ame bellissime, Comme plaisir, et gloire à l’Univers, Et en vertu rarement rarissime Engendre en moy mille souciz divers: Mesmes son oeil pudiquement pervers Me penetrant le vif du sentement, Me ravit tout en tel contentement, Que du desir est ma joye remplie, Le voyant l’oeil, aussi l’entendement, Parfaicte au corps, et en l’ame accomplie. (D 424)

The poet praises the beauty and perfection of Délie’s attributes, which include her virtue, body, and soul. Délie’s cosmic beauty and perfection bestows pleasure and glory on the universe: this is consistent with Dante’s praise of the celestial Beatrice. But Délie’s gaze, while “pudique,” is also “pervers” (from Latin pervertere; turned aside from its natural course, with possible connotations of vice, danger, or the forbidden). Her gaze is direct and roving, rather than coy. Délie’s gaze affects the poet, its impact not confined to the spiritual or intellectual realm: pénétrer and ravir accompany “ma joye remplie,” “sentement,” and “desir.” Délie’s gaze penetrates and ravishes the poet, instead of his gaze devouring her beauty. His response includes disquiet (“mille souciz divers”) and joy transformed into desire. Their eyes meet, and understanding passes between them (“Le voyant l’oeil, aussi l’entendement”). The vocabulary of dizain 424 combines the Neoplatonic with the erotic; the poet alludes to the bodily experience of love and desire, not exclusively to spiritual contemplation. However, the dizain is not 20 See Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 1, p. 14. 21 Leone Ebreo, Dialogo d’amore, trans. Pontus de Tyard, 3: “Quand doncq l’ame spirituelle (qui est cœur de nostre cœur et ame de nostre ame . . . ),” etc. See Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 1, p. 14.

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consistently Neoplatonic. In his Dialogues on Love, Leone Ebreo includes beauty, pleasure, and a type of union of body and soul under the domain of reason to define human love. Although Ebreo does not emphasize the erotic in exalted forms of love, his Dialogues are a source for Scève’s Délie, as critics have shown.22

Love as devastation, love as contemplation Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève all present the idea of devastation as integral to the experience of love. This is essentially absent in Ficino’s De amore, which emphasizes beauty and transcendence without the troublesome emotional consequences. Ficino equates love with zeal, piety, and worship of the divine.23 Paradoxically, Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Commedia is closer at times to the Ficinian model than that of Scève for Délie, although Délie is a more Neoplatonic work than the Commedia. Ficino’s interpretation of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone “Donna me prega” exerted a profound influence on subsequent readers of the poem.24 Thus, two divergent theories of love crossed paths. Cavalcanti enriched his poetry by incorporating material from the fields of logic, science, and philosophy. He used Aristotelian technical vocabulary in order to define love as part of the doctrine of matter dominated by necessity.25 Dante in turn enriched his poetry with vast encyclopedic knowledge, but the Commedia was theologically oriented, whereas Cavalcanti’s poetry was not.26 Ficino wrote in De amore that Guido Cavalcanti’s poems presented him as a philosopher of love (VII, 1), indirectly referring to “Donna me prega.” Paul Oskar Kristeller observes: Ficino’s speculation on love was foreshadowed . . . by the old Provençal and Tuscan lyric to which he himself consciously refers. In this respect the explicit quotation of Guido Cavalcanti in the De amore is of great importance, and in other points also the influence of the old poets is clearly visible in Ficino. The physiological theory concerning the genesis of love which makes the so-called spirit pass from the heart of the beloved person through its eyes to the eyes and the heart of the lover and the whole technical language of love which exchanges the Souls of the lovers and transforms them into each other . . . are evidently taken from poetry and developed into a more precise system.27

22 23 24 25 26 27

Hunkeler discusses Ebreo’s dialogues in Vif du sens, 190–94. Ficino, De amore, VII, 15. Ciavolella, “Ficino’s Interpretation,” 43. See Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, chap. 3, 71 sq. See Ardizzone, Other Middle Ages, 10. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, 287.

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Both Kristeller and Festugière acknowledge Ficino’s debt to earlier vernacular love lyric. For Ficino, the Neoplatonic conception of love between two persons served as another vehicle to transmit troubadour and stilnovo traditions, albeit in distorted form, as Massimo Ciavolella has demonstrated; previous scholars missed the distorted reading of Cavalcanti’s doctrinal canzone.28 Ficino seeks to assimilate Cavalcanti’s explanation of the nature of love with the Socratic model from Plato’s Symposium. Ficino mentions the dichotomy in Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega” between sensual lust and divine love as contemplation. However, as Ciavolella points out, Ficino does not conclude with Cavalcanti and his commentators that love, far from the realm of reason, leads the lover to melancholy and destruction.29 Instead, while borrowing from Egidio Colonna’s commentary on “Donna me prega,” Ficino employs the simile of the sun’s rays illuminating shadows to represent poetic love, which leads to perfection: the rays stand for the physical beauty of the body, as opposed to the metaphysical beauty of the divine. The Florentine Neoplatonist emphasizes the contemplation of divine things and sidesteps the Cavalcantian ereos or “erotic melancholy,” a philosophy of love associated with sensual appetite, danger, and death.30 The preferred love for Ficino is asexual, universal, clearly delineated, and purged of the body’s dark passions. Ficino writes favorably of the angelic, contemplative life, which he contrasts with the “bestial or voluptuous life” (ferinam et voluptuosam . . . vitam: De amore VII, 1), as if the bestial is tied to the sensual and erotic, which is the case in his schema. Erotic sensuality plays no part in the Ficinian model of ideal love, which thus diverges both from Cavalcanti’s definition and from fin’amor. If it involves libidinous desire, it constitutes lust and is therefore vulgar and dangerous because it can lead to madness, which renders man a beast-like creature. Such a condition cannot be considered part of love. The form of madness for divine love is an illumination of the rational soul with four possible levels, the lowest of which is poetic madness, and the highest, love-madness.31 Ficino incorporates the distinction from Plato’s Phaedrus between two main types of madness, degraded and divine. In De amore, Ficino denies the prominence of smell, taste, and touch in love for the perception of beauty, in the commentary on the first speech of the Symposium: he insists that love pertains only to the mind (mens), to seeing and

28 See Massimo Ciavolella, “Ficino’s Interpretation of ‘Donna me prega,’” in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, 39–48. 29 Ciavolella, “Ficino’s Interpretation,” 42–43. 30 “Amor ereos,” from Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary on “Donna me prega.” On “amor hereos,” see Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 132–33. 31 Ficino, De amore, VII, 13–14.

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to hearing (I, 4). In De triplici vita (Three Books on Life), Ficino asserts that the sense of touch is the most estranged from intellect of all the senses (I, 7). In contrast, Cavalcanti characterizes love as follows: “non razionale, ma che sente, dico” (not the rational do I mean, but the sensory: XXVII, 31). Ficino excludes the erotic dimension of love experienced through the other senses, preferring transcendence: Lucem illam corporis, non aures, non olfatus, non gustus, non tactus, sed oculus percipit. Si oculus solus agnoscit, solus fruitur. Solus igitur oculus corporis pulchritudine fruitur. Cum vero amor nihil aliud sit nisi fruende pulchritudinis desiderium, hec autem solis oculis comprehendatur, solo aspectu amator corporis est contentus. Tangendi vero cupido non amoris pars est nec amantis affectus, sed petulantie speties et servilis hominis perturbatio (De amore II, 9). (This light of the body, it is not the ears, smell, taste or touch, but the eye that perceives it. If the eye alone recognizes [the light of the body], it alone enjoys it. Therefore the eye alone enjoys the beauty of the body. But since love is nothing else except the desire of enjoying beauty, and since only the eyes can apprehend it, the lover of the body is content with sight alone. Thus the desire to touch is not a part of love, nor is it a passion of the lover, but rather a kind of lust and perturbation of a man who is servile.)

Ficino lists the senses, excluding four (other than sight) from perceiving the body’s light. Ficino’s position on the function of the senses in love contrasts with Scève’s dizain 41: Le veoir, l’ouyr, le parler, le toucher Finoient le but de mon contentement, Tant que le bien, qu’Amantz ont sur tout cher, N’eust oncques lieu en nostre accointement. Que m’a valu d’aymer honnestement En saincte amour chastement esperdu? Puis que m’en est le mal pour bien rendu, Et qu’on me peult pour vice reprocher, Qu’en bien aymant j’ay promptement perdu La veoir, l’ouyr, lui parler, la toucher. (D 41)

Scève adapts Marot’s five points of the gradus amoris.32 The poet expresses bitter disillusionment about the established rules for chaste amour, in which the lover’s goal is “bien, qu’Amantz ont sur tout cher.” Scève has followed convention (aimer honnêtement, bien aimer) and lost, obtaining neither the good nor love, but only pain. The erotic is juxtaposed with chastity. Loving well—that is, loving according to Ficino—implies relinquishing pleasures of the senses, as

32 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 41. See Marot, “Fleur de quinze ans,” etc.

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well as avoiding interaction that could lead to an accusation of vice. The dizain is framed by the opening and closing lines, which list four physical functions by which we apprehend the world: sight, hearing, speech, and touch; first, as abstract functions, and in the last line, for the purpose of personal exchange, presumably with Délie, who is not named. The sense of touch evokes the yearning of lovers for intimacy. The word “Amantz” is capitalized, indicating the mythic, typological importance of lovers in heritage and tradition (compare this with the parade of illustrious lovers in Petrarch’s Triumphus cupidinis, and with Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Inferno 5). Scève’s adverb chastement may refer also to the figure of Chastity in Petrarch’s second Triumph, the Triumphus pudicitie (Italian: Trionfo della pudicizia). The poet-lover Scève does not seek chastity as an ideal, despite its inclusion in conventional definitions of female virtue, and Délie as “object de plus haulte vertu.” Chastity is antithetical to reciprocity in love-passion (a rhetorical instance of adynaton, impossibility). Scève combines ardor with his conception of virtue, which aligns with Dante. Ficino writes that according to Pausanias in the Symposium, a contemplation of the body must be accompanied by a contemplation of the higher beauty of the soul, the mind, and God; the lover must admire and love the abstract beauty more strongly; otherwise the love is improper.33 Cavalcanti, in contrast, did not view the lover as desiring only to piously contemplate or revere his beloved as one would a statue of God,34 as Ficino indicates for the lover. Cavalcanti claims that love is identified as such because of the pleasure it produces: “e ’l piacimento che ’l fa dire amare” (and the pleasurableness that makes it called love: XXVII, 14). Ficino sublimates sensual aspects contributing to an erotic experience: he discusses pleasure, voluptas, in conjunction with the return to the Good (bonus), as emerging from love and beauty.35 Ficino states that God is at the origin of all beauty, and that bodies are the shadows and traces of souls and minds: “Corpora enim animarum mentiumque umbre et vestigia sunt” (De amore II, 3). The body’s beauty is relative or flawed, whereas Scève’s poetry emphasizes the perfection of Délie’s body, beauty, and form. For Ficino, the body’s physical beauty is limited and temporary; he maintains that beauty and the body are different. For Scève, Délie’s beauty is perfect, including her body. Ficino explains that in the circle of God, goodness is at the center, and beauty, the ray emanating from God, forms the circumference. Divine beauty kindles the ardor of the soul, for the divine desires divine things: “Illinc enim animi ardor accenditur. Quippe 33 Ficino, De amore, II, 7. 34 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 33. 35 Ficino, De amore, II, 2 et passim. He writes that love, beginning from beauty, ends in pleasure: “Amor igitur in voluptatem a pulchritudine desinit.”

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par est ut divinus divina desideret” (De amore II, 4). Ardor is displaced from the material body to the immaterial spirit. Even Urania, the celestial epithet of Venus mentioned by Pausanias to represent divine love according to Ficino, finds its etymological origin in the myth36 that Aphrodite was born from the foam of Uranus’s castrated genitals falling into the sea (evidently a sexual reference). But Ficino avoids this association and mentions only that Venus Urania was born of Uranus, without a mother (II, 8). While Ficino’s passage is faithful to Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium, Ficino’s commentary disagrees with Pausanias in other respects.37 The idea that the individual will is overwhelmed by the experience of love is common to fin’amor and Neoplatonic systems, among others. According to Neoplatonism, human love is a small manifestation of the greater cosmos, like a flash whose origin is divine light. The individual will is subject to the vast cosmos. First the soul and then the body is penetrated by a ray, according to Ficino (De amore VI, 10). The ray produces love that shines out through the eyes and penetrates the eyes of another, awakening the appetite. In the Symposium, Plato mentions the senses and sight as functioning in love: the lovers meet and are struck by one another (192b, in the speech of Aristophanes). Platonism accords with courtly love concerning the importance of the eyes, the moment of seeing the beloved, and the innamoramento. Ficino comments on this in De amore II, 6 and 7, interpreting it as sight of the divine beauty. He writes: “Cum primum humani corporis speties oculis nostris offertur, mens nostra que prima in nobis Venus est, eam tamquam divini decoris imaginem veneratur et diligit perque hanc ad illum

36 This story is discounted in the encyclopedic Mythologie Générale, edited by Félix Guirand (Paris: Larousse, 1937) as the origin for Aphrodite’s name, based on the Greek word for foam. According to the Theogony of Hesiod (fl. ca. 700 BCE), Aphrodite is born from the dismembered genitals of Uranus (vv. 188–206), whereas in the Iliad of Homer (fl. ca. 750 BCE), Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione (book 5, vv. 370–417). 37 See, e.g., Plato’s Symposium, 180d–185c. According to Pausanias, Aphrodite Urania presides over love for boys, which he considers more noble than love for women. An erotic expression of love is acceptable for Pausanias, though not for Ficino. Pausanias says that any action is not good or bad in itself, but depends on how it is done: “If an action is done honorably and properly, it turns out to be honorable . . . Love is not in himself noble and worthy of praise; that depends on whether the sentiments he produces in us are themselves noble” (Symposium 181a). This contrasts with Ficino, who writes: “Si quis generationis avidior contemplationem deserat aut generationem preter modum cum feminis vel contra nature ordinem cum masculis prosequatur aut formam corporis pulchritudini animi preferat, is utique dignitate amoris abutitur. Hunc amoris abusum vituperat Pausanias” (If anyone, through being more desirous of procreation, neglects contemplation or attends to procreation beyond measure with women, or against the order of nature with men, or prefers the form of the body to the beauty of the soul, he certainly abuses the dignity of love. This abuse of love Pausanias censures: De amore II, 7).

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sepenumero incitatur” (When the beauty of a human body first meets our eyes, our intellect, which is the first Venus in us, worships and esteems it as an image of the divine beauty, and through this is often aroused to that: De amore II, 7). Love is defined as desire for beauty (De amore I, 4) and involves the soul’s return to God. According to Plato and Plotinus, a human being chooses between earthly (physical) love and divine love: desire for the body causes descent, while desire for the ideal (spiritual) beauty brings ascent and the soul’s eventual reunion with the divine. Perception of the body’s physical beauty, while impermanent and limited, represents the first stage in the perception of beauty, which at a more advanced level approaches the divine and metaphysical, the Platonic synthesis of the good and the beautiful. Goodness and beauty fuse the moral with the aesthetic ideal, and draw one toward God. Ficino uses a hook as a metaphor for beauty, implying, as Kristeller writes, that “the beauty of things is the lure by which the Soul of the lover is led to God.”38 For Plato and Ficino, in loving the beautiful without lust, one draws closer to the good. Petrarch’s love for Laura departs from this Neoplatonic schema in that Laura’s beauty, despite inspiring love, leads him to risk eternal damnation as a Christian through vanity. Laura herself is not truly responsible for his vanity, for the poet desires fame and glory, which she represents for him; Laura is a poetic character, existing in his verses, whereas the poet’s salvation transcends his text. Instead of exalting him, Laura’s inaccessible beauty causes Petrarch’s persona guilt and woe, which stems from his unrequited, unfulfilled desire. In De amore’s commentary to Speeches VI and VII of Plato’s Symposium, Ficino explains love in medical terms according to the blood’s condition and the four humors. Love is compared to illness: Ficino writes about the enchantment to which lovers are subject, and, following Musaeus (Hero and Leander), maintains that the cause and origin of the illness is the eye.39 This accords with medieval theory about the genesis of love, in which the sight of the beloved gives rise to an image in the lover. According to Ficino, the blood, like the spirits, is thin and clear, warm and sweet in youth (Ficino seems to focus on male lovers). Lovers are melancholic for the following reasons: the lover’s soul is devoted to constant thoughts of the beloved, so that the body becomes dry and wan for lack of heat, which affects the digestion.40 The spirits, produced in the

38 Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, 268. 39 Ficino, De amore, VII, 10. 40 Ficino, De amore, VI, 9.

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heart and consuming the thinnest blood, fly to the image of the beloved in the lover’s imagination. The blood becomes impure, thick, and black; black bile is produced, resulting in melancholy. Ficino does, however, mention women. For example, he relates a medical observation from Aristotle relevant for blood and spirits: menstruating women will soil a mirror with drops of blood from their gaze, due to the spirit in the blood’s vapor.41 In Délie, Scève’s poetry does not adhere to the functions of the senses and pleasure set forth in De amore. For Ficino, if pleasure is divinely sanctioned, it does not emerge from the appetitive faculties. During a discussion about God governing things by threes, Ficino introduces the triad Pulchritudo, Amor, and Voluptas: “Amor igitur in voluptatem a pulchritudine desinit” (Love starts from beauty and ends with pleasure: De amore II, 2).42 Love mediates between beauty and pleasure, consistent with Plato in the Symposium: “[L]ove is desire aroused by beauty.”43 In Ficino’s view, love should consist of a desire for contemplation, not for embrace; otherwise it is an abuse of love.44 Yet Scève writes: Or si le sens, voye de la raison, Me fait jouir de tous plaisirs aultant, Que ses vertus, et sans comparaison De sa beauté toute aultre surmontant, Ne sens je en nous parfaire, en augmentant L’hermaphrodite, efficace amoureuse? (D 435.1–6)

Scève initially refers to the senses as leading to reasoned discourse through the intellect. Sensual experience coexists with the perception of beauty and virtue. The dizain blends the Ficinian lexicon (reason, virtue, beauty, and love) with erotic allusions (jouir de tous plaisirs), particularly the hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite combined male and female in heterosexual union, the two joined in one flesh, as expressed by the verb parfaire (to perfect, complete, accomplish, finish; from the Latin verb perficere). It is one possible physical outcome of hierogamy, expressing union as the fusion into one body. In his Dialoghi (Venice, 1542), Sperone Speroni discusses contemplation of “l’Hermaphrodito amoroso” when

41 Ficino, De amore, VII, 4. 42 Ficino, De amore, II, 2. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 43. Wind discusses Ficino in the context of the medal of Pico della Mirandola with an inscription of the three Graces as figures of Pulchritudo, Amor, and Voluptas. These are not exact significations for the three Graces of ancient Greek myth, who according to Hesiod (Theogony, vv. 907–9) were Aglaia (Radiance), Euphrosyne (Joy), and Thalia (Flowering). 43 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 46. 44 Ficino, De amore, VI, 9.

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the lover perceives the merits of loving by means of the intellect, rather than the senses.45 This line recalls the androgyne myth recounted by Aristophanes in the Symposium, and the Socratic reference to Diotima is present as well. Beyond the emphasis on reason and the senses, the situation unfolds at the abstract level of intellect, through the text of Ficino’s treatise and in the poetry of Cavalcanti and Scève. Festugière writes of Scève: “Il est de ceux en effet chez qui se retrouve, de la façon la plus complète et la plus fidèle, la doctrine du Commentaire . . . . Dans leur fond, leurs symboles, et dans l’ordre même de leur progression, les dizains de la Délie semblent tout inspirés de ses théories.”46 While there are Ficinian elements in Délie, Scève includes in his conception of love sensual experience and physical beauty that inspires erotic desire. The Cavalcantian (and troubadour) perspective informs “les morts” of Scève. Sensual pleasure and virtue are not mutually exclusive for Scève. This distinguishes Scève from both Ficino and Petrarch. My interpretation differs from Festugière’s concerning the degree to which Délie is a Neoplatonic text that conforms to Ficino’s love doctrines. Festugière takes the example of the introductory huitain (which he calls a dizain), claiming that Scève contrasts Venus and Cupid with love to establish a parallel between carnal pleasure and divine love.47 Scève’s huitain begins as follows: Non de Venus les ardentz estincelles, Et moins les traictz, desquels Cupido tire: Mais bien les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles Je t’ay voulu en cest Oeuvre descrire. (1–4)

This does not correspond to Ficino’s Neoplatonic schema, in which Venus presides over more than one type of love, and Cupid (here not identical to Eros in the Symposium)48 has a long literary history outside Neoplatonism.

45 Scève, Délie, ed. Joukovsky, note to D 435, p. 379. 46 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 94. 47 “Le dizain [sic] liminaire de l’ouvrage, dédié par le poète ‘à sa Délie’, témoigne déjà de l’influence ficinienne. Car, opposant Vénus et Cupido à l’Amour, la volupté charnelle à l’amour divin, Scève affirme que ce dernier amour dont il est embrasé fera le sujet de ses vers” (Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 95). Scève is indeed subject to the flames of divine love, but Scève’s conception of love does not exclude the erotic, which is why it is neither fully Ficinian nor fully Petrarchan. 48 Greek and Roman deities were not properly recognized as distinct prior to the work of Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768).

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Ficino places the highest grade of divine love under the sign of Venus (De amore VII, 14), and both the vulgar and the exalted types of love defined by Pausanias in the Symposium come under her purview (for exalted love, Venus Urania). When Scève alludes to servitude as in dizain 12 (“Heureux service en libre servitude,” line 10), it recalls feudal relations in courtly love (with the lady as midons), not Neoplatonic love as Festugière identifies it.49 Festugière writes of Scevian love: “Cet amour est toujours chaste. La seule contemplation de Délie suffit au poète.”50 However, we see from dizains 41, 161, 428, and others that this is not the case. The way Scève links death with love is in part Ficinian, although for Scève and other poets,51 “la mort” may bear an erotic connotation, meaning climax (la petite mort), which it does not for Ficino. Ficino does not refer to death in the plural (and Petrarch rarely does), as Scève does repeatedly: for example, “les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles.”52 Scevian affinities between love and death are more Cavalcantian than Ficinian or Petrarchan. Many emblems evoke death.53 Scève writes of Délie’s fatal beauty: “En sa beauté gist ma mort, et ma vie” (D 6.10); this is consistent with Cavalcantian love. In dizain 439, alongside the Platonic reference to Diotima (Dyotime)54 as his teacher, Scève writes of a phantasme of pleasure: Bien que raison soit nourrice de l’ame, Alimenté est le sens du doulx songe De vain plaisir, qui en tous lieux m’entame, Me penetrant, comme l’eau en l’esponge. Dedans lequel il m’abysme, et me plonge Me suffocquant toute vigueur intime. Dont pour excuse, et cause legitime Je ne me doibs grandement esbahir, Si ma tressaincte, et sage Dyotime Tousjours m’enseigne à aymer, et hair. (D 439)

49 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 96. 50 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 98. 51 One is reminded of Marot’s chanson “Jouyssance vous donneray” (L’Adolescence clémentine XII, 4). 52 Cf. Petrarch, Rvf 44.12, “mille morti” as military trope. 53 For example, dizains 1, 7, 11, 13, 17, 18, 21, 27, 30, 44, 45, 46, and 50. 54 This dizain is among those toward the end of Délie influenced by Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore, in Dialoghi (Venice, 1542), mainly the first dialogue (see McFarlane, 482–90).

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Scève indicates the powerful effect that imagined pleasure, doulx songe, exerts on his senses: it saps him of “vigueur intime” (an erotic reference) and ensnares him. Scève apparently identifies Délie by the epithet of Diotima in this dizain. Diotima in the Symposium did not teach Socrates to hate, but to love, meaning that Scève’s line does not come from Plato’s text. Ficino mentions Diotima repeatedly in his commentary, but Speroni alludes to love and hate, which Defaux identifies as the source for this line, as had Parturier.55 Ficino’s view, to which Scève alludes in the dizain’s first line, is insufficient for the poet: he cannot deny the “vain” pleasures of the senses, despite his intentions. Sensual pleasure is not presented as sinful. In dizains 435 and 439, as elsewhere, the word “sens” is used, and “raison” reminds the poet of the proper focus, yet the theme of the senses recurs in the verses. Délie would be Scève’s Diotima as one of her many metamorphoses (other avatars include Hecate, Dictynna, Diana, and Artemis), guiding and instructing him in the ways of love, though perhaps not with the same lessons that the priestess Diotima provided to Socrates in the Symposium. Scève writes of Délie in periphrasis, “Incessamment travaillant en moy celle, / Qui à aymer enseigne, et reverer” (D 436.1–2). In the Symposium, as well as in Ficino’s commentary, love for another person does not involve reverence, which for Christians is reserved for God. However, the courtly lover reveres his beloved. Délie/Dyotime is a constant presence in Scève, teaching him how to love, although she does not always reciprocate his love for her. Just as Délie initiates Scève in love, Scève initiates his readers via the poetic sequence. Line 10 of dizain 439 recalls “Odi et amo” (Carmen 85) of Catullus, rather than Ficino or Plato, indicating the love-hate topos in which the beloved is both enemy and friend, love being described in terms of both conflict and desire. Another dizain mentions “Doulce ennemye, en qui ma dolente ame / Souffre trop plus, que le corps martyré” (D 197.1–2). Scève explores the internal turmoil of his desire and suffering with vacillation between life and death. Petrarch writes, “vo’ che m’oda / la dolce mia nemica anzi ch’io moia” (I wish my sweet enemy to hear me before I die: Rvf 125.44–45). Petrarch’s rhetorical claim that he is dying is exploited to seek Laura’s attention. The poet is ironic, and suffering is articulated through figures of death.

55 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 439, pp. 473–74. Defaux quotes Speroni: “et come esser possa, che alcuna volta la cosa amata, amando, odij et voglia male al amante.”

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Scève’s dizain 43 treats love and hate with a series of oppositions, and manifests classical inspiration from Roman poets: Moins je la voy, certes plus je la hays: Plus je la hays, et moins elle me fasche. Plus je l’estime, et moins compte j’en fais: Plus je la fuys, plus veulx, qu’elle me sache. En un moment deux divers traictz me lasche Amour, et hayne, ennuy avec plaisir. Forte est l’amour, qui lors me vient saisir, Quand hayne vient et vengeance me crie: Ainsi me faict hayr mon vain desir Celle, pour qui mon coeur tousjours me prie.56

The adjective vain (line 9) seems to signify unfulfilled desire, rather than desire that verges on sin, or desire that strays from a moral path. The poet despises his desire because it causes frustration and suffering, arising despite his hayne and need for vengeance. The expression of violence and passion in the dizain is similar to Cavalcanti’s poetry, and to Dante in the petrosa canzone “Cosí nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro” (So in my speech I want to be harsh): “non sarei pietoso né cortese, anzi farei come orso quando scherza / (. . .) io mi vendicherei di più di mille” (I would not be pitying or courteous, I would be like a bear when it plays, . . . I would take vengeance more than a thousand times: 70–73).57 This is comparable to Scève’s persona in his “obstiné vouloir” (D 309.3) who seems to overpower his companion. Ficino, however, banishes violence and passion as being counter to divine love. He writes that one person cannot hate another person, but only vices, just as one part of the created world cannot despise another part; this is demonstrated with a ponderous discussion of why fire and water abhor each other (De amore III, 2). (Ficino’s configuration can function as doctrine, but not as psychology.) For Ficino, hate arises if an image that passes into another’s soul does not correspond to its ideal form; the soul is displeased, and the image is regarded with hate as being ugly (De amore V, 5). Thus, hatred is defined in terms of correspondences. The following lists in parallel columns compare Ficino’s description (De amore VII, 1) of the two types of love, according to his reading of Cavalcanti’s

56 Ovid, Amores III, 2, 34–37, and Marullus, Epigrammata IV, 29 (F. Joukovsky, note to D 43, pp. 233–34). 57 English translations of the rime petrose are by Robert Durling (1976).

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poem “Donna me prega.” I have provided the titles according to Ficino’s evaluation of each type, with English translations for his terms:

DEBASED LOVE • • • •

EXALTED LOVE

sense appetite body love inclined to senses lust

• physical response • particular beauty of a single body • love drives man down to the bestial or voluptuous life • troubled by many passions • most people experience

• • • • • • • • •

intellect reason love remote from body in the will, love arises that is foreign to commerce with the body contemplation universal beauty of the human race love elevates man up to angelic or contemplative life free from perturbation few people experience

In concluding his interpretation of Cavalcanti’s version of love, Ficino writes that, since most people are seized by the first type of love, Cavalcanti “dismisses the latter in a few words, and is more prolix in explaining the passions of the other” (VII, 1).58 In “Donna me prega,” even leaving aside the complex scholastic apparatus that overshadows the poem and echoes throughout its vocabulary, Cavalcanti is not contrasting two different types of love as if they were polar opposites, as Ficino implies in his explication. Two types of love, vulgar or earthly and exalted, are explained in Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, which Plotinus and subsequently Ficino interpret in their commentaries. To the two types of love correspond the two manifestations of Aphrodite (Venus), also vulgar and heavenly. In the opening lines of “Donna me prega,” the adjectives “fero” and “altero” appear in reference to love (amore), as well as the substantive “accidente” and the polysemic verb “sentire,” which may signify hearing, understanding, or feeling: Donna me prega, per ch’eo voglio dire d’un accidente che sovente è fero ed è si altero ch’è chiamato amore: sì chi lo nega possa ’l ver sentire! (lines 1–4)

58 Ficino: “Ideo istum paucis verbis absolvit, in alterius passionibus enarrandis prolixior” (VII, 1).

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(A lady bids me, and so I would speak Of an accident that is often unruly And so haughty that it is called love: Would that he who denies that were able to feel its truth!)59

From the outset, Cavalcanti identifies love as beyond the realm of reason, in a statement about love, not one inferior type of love (the vulgar, sensual one involving lust for a particular body). According to Cavalcanti, human life is buffeted by the winds of the passions and desires, but such passions can bring exaltation.60 Love is located in the sensitive soul rather than the intellect, and is thus the irrational phenomenon par excellence.61 The sensitive soul is central to Cavalcanti’s theory of happiness; what gives pleasure (diletto) is satisfaction of the body’s desires. For Cavalcanti, the intellect does not generate happiness. The pleasure of love for human beings consists solely in its darkness: that is, its sensuality.62 While “fero,” love is also “altero,” not degraded or vulgar. This conflicts with Ficino’s conception of love. Ficino teased out two polarized sets of characteristics of the love experience (assembled from Cavalcanti, Plato, and Plotinus), retaining preferred aspects while excluding others. Characteristics in both of Ficino’s categories are found in the lyric poetry of Cavalcanti, Petrarch and Scève, and in passages of Dante. Scève, like Cavalcanti, uses the word “accident” to describe love in dizain 337: “Veu que Fortune aux accidentz commande, / Amour au Coeur, et la Mort sur le Corps” (1–2). This passage correponds remarkably well to Cavalcanti’s definition of love, though not to that of Ficino. It may constitute an intertextual connection with “Donna me prega,” which was included in the giuntina anthology, in Jean de Tournes’s Lyonnais editions of Petrarch (1545) and Dante (1547), and other books containing stilnovo lyric. It is understandable that certain lines of “Donna me prega” would resonate with Ficino: for example, “non ha diletto ma consideranza” (it [love] does not have pleasure but rather contemplation: XXVII, 27), and “E non si pò conoscer per lo viso” (and [love] cannot be known by sight: XXVII, 63). In Cavalcanti’s poem and elsewhere in his work, distinctions are evident in relation to Ficino’s ideas. The central role of the donna in the courtly context is swept aside by Ficino: if love no longer incorporates sexual passion or carnal desire, love can signify friendship, a matter among men (for the church, Christian men are not supposed to desire one another carnally); women are no longer essential in a love relationship.

59 Guido Cavalcanti, trans. Lowry Nelson. 60 Ardizzone, Other Middle Ages, 5. Dante’s whirlwind in the circle of the lustful (Inf. 5) is similar to Cavalcanti’s characterization. 61 Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, ed. Marcello Ciccuto, note to poem XXVII, 116. 62 Ardizzone, Other Middle Ages, 9.

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The pagan Greeks portrayed in the Symposium freely discussed and could engage in homosexual relations, but the ordained priest Ficino does not advocate this forbidden activity any more than he advocates heterosexual copulation. Ficino indicates that women attract men easily, but that men attract other men more easily, since they are more alike. Ficino compares love to magic, in which individuals are compelled to respond to love (De amore VI, 10). Ficino is concerned with love from men’s perspectives, and seems to believe that divine love occurs only between men (with the possible exception of illustrious mythical or legendary women). Cavalcanti’s doctrinal poem, in accordance with courtly convention, presents as its raison d’être the request of an unnamed lady to the poet that he speak of love (“Donna me prega, per ch’eo voglio dire”). Elsewhere, Cavalcanti praises a lady in cosmic terms, prefiguring Dante, Petrarch, and Scève: “vedra’ la sua vertù nel ciel salita” (you will see her virtue risen to heaven: XXVI, 20). This line, and indeed much of the poem, is comparable to Dante’s lines about his celestial Beatrice. But Ficino, despite being a grand lecteur of Cavalcanti and Dante, discards the convention of the lady’s courtly role in relation to the poet who praises her. Instead, the divine aspect is displaced from the lady to the male lover, who then loves another male’s beautiful soul without carnal passion; this retains the spiritual aspect developed by the stilnovisti, but Ficino’s Platonic love often differs from fin’amor and stilnovo love lyric. In a section of De amore (II, 8) containing parallels with courtly love, Ficino distinguishes between simple love and reciprocal love, with asexual love between men as ideal. The sublimation of erotic passion is total. Ficino writes that whoever loves, dies (symbolically, one surmises). Stripped of its sexual and emotional elements, falling in love is a relatively tame affair: does the lover expire if the beloved does not return his love? Does one die of an unfulfilled desire for friendship? (The pair would not know each other well without friendship.) If the unrequited love is akin to friendship, defined only as divine, virtuous, nonphysical, and without passion, then perhaps it is strange that the Platonic lover should die from it. Even Montaigne, who was devastated by the death of his close friend Étienne de la Boétie in 1563, survived and continued to write and to function, and their alliance constituted reciprocal love that might fit Ficino’s model. Ficino mentions Orpheus, whose beloved was the nymph Eurydice, and who sang about the tragic lot of lovers, calling love bittersweet (II, 8). The description of love as bittersweet (Fr. doux-amer, It. dolce-amaro, etc.) is a topos of love lyric. Scève mentions death as a relief from suffering: “La Mort, seul bien des tristes affligez” (D 45.10). In dizain 71, cited below, Scève addresses death as “doulce Mort.” Dante writes in the canzone “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel): “se ’l martiro è dolce, la morte de’ passar ogni altro dolce” (if the suffering is sweet, the death

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must surpass every other sweet: 64–65). Bernart de Ventadorn had previously developed this theme in his lyric. Why is love associated with death? Suffering and illness in general, either of which can be fatal, are associated with death, and symptoms of falling in love are likened to fever and diagnosed as medical illness (especially melancholy, which is diagnosed as an excess of black bile). Sexual climax, as reflected in la petite mort, can resemble death throes. Ecstasy may be preceded by crisis or devastation, as mystics relate. These occurrences are destabilizing and perhaps violent, yet they do not explain the significance of death in the conception of love. Death is by definition extreme. Cavalcanti expressed terror at the strength of the lady’s beauty, which could overwhelm him: “sol par che Morte m’aggia ‘n sua balìa. (. . .) s’i’ la sguardasse, ne morria” (It seems only that Death has me in its power. [. . .] if I glanced at her, I would die of it: XXXI, 17 and 24). An intense experience of passionate love recalls the fragility and fleeting temporality of human life, and the sensation of losing oneself can be terrifying. Poetic affinities between Cavalcanti and Scève emerge through dark motifs of love and death. For Cavalcanti, we have seen that love exalts but also brings dangerous passion, overwhelming reason. Cavalcanti writes in “Donna me prega” that one is brought closer to death when one loves: “di sua potenza segue spesso morte” (death often follow’s on love’s potency: XXVII, 35); and, “non pò dire om ch’aggia vita, / ché stabilita non ha segnoria” (one cannot say that one is alive, for one has not established selfmastery: XXVII, 40). As mentioned, Ficino echoes Cavalcanti’s point that one who loves dies (cited below), but he does not mean what Cavalcanti means. Scève invents a dialogue in dizain 71 between the poet and Death: Si en ton lieu j’estois, ô doulce Mort, Tu ne serois de ta faulx dessaisie. O fol, l’esprit de ta vie est jà mort. Comment? je vois. Ta force elle a saisie. Je parle aumoins. Ce n’est que phrenesie. Vivray je donc tousjours? Non: lon termine Ailleurs ta fin. Et où? Plus n’examine. Car tu vivras sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame, En ceste mort plus, que vie, benigne, Puis que tel est le vouloir de ta Dame.63

63 Joukovsky identifies this dizain with Petrarch’s Rvf 358, but aside from “dolce” qualifying “morte,” D 71 and Rvf 358 are quite different: Rvf 358 is not a dialogue but a monologue addressing death. Petrarch laments Laura’s death, which brings the poet’s own death closer because of grief: “Non po far Morte il dolce viso amaro, / ma ’l dolce viso dolce po far Morte” (Rvf 358.1–2).

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The poet-lover is totally under Délie’s power, and her power must be significant since she can command life and death over him. She takes his heart, body, and soul, so that only a shade of the poet-lover remains. Death becomes her minister, doing her bidding. He addresses Scève as “fol” (evoking fol’amor, or l’amour démesuré, beyond reason), and tells the poet he is already dead, in accordance with Cavalcanti’s statement that death often results from love. Death is preferable to life without Délie (line 9). The substantives fol and phrenesie contrast with the verb examiner, which Death orders the poet to cease doing, underscoring the mad passion in Scève’s love. Ficino’s answer to the question of why love and death are linked is intriguing but insufficient: the lover’s attention is always turned to the beloved, rather than back onto himself. Ficino writes: Una vero duntaxat in amore mutuo mors est, reviviscentia duplex. Moritur enim qui amat in se ipso semel, cum se negligit. Reviviscit in amato statim, cum amatus eum ardenti cogitatione complectitur. Reviviscit iterum, cum in amato se denique recognoscit et amatum se esse non dubitat. O felicem mortem, quam due vite secuntur! (De amore II, 8) (But in reciprocal love, there is only one death, a double resurrection. For he who loves dies in himself once, when he neglects himself. He revives immediately in the beloved when the beloved receives him in loving thought. He revives again when he finally recognizes himself in the beloved, and does not doubt that he is loved. O happy death which two lives follow!)

And so the lovers attain an abstract metaphysical union: the two become one. However, death in this schema appears to be manageable, safe, and temporary. This is inconsistent with tragic lovers in myth, literature, and art, whether death is symbolic or literal. In a passage that echoes medieval rules of love (for example, from De arte honeste amandi or the Roman de la rose), Ficino articulates every spurned lover’s wish: Quis eum homicidam esse neget qui amatur, cum animam ab amante seiungat? . . . Quapropter iure ipso amare debet quisquis amatur. Qui vero non amat amantem, homicidii reus est habendus. Immo vero fur, homicida, sacrilegus. (De amore II, 8) (Who would deny that a man who is loved is a murderer, since he separates the soul from the lover? . . . Therefore, out of justice itself, whoever is loved ought to love in return. But he who does not love his lover must be held answerable for murder. No, rather a thief, murderer, desecrator.)

Ficino uses religious vocabulary to illustrate the gravity of the crime of not reciprocating love, qualifying such a knave as “sacrilegus,” although the context is defined as asexual; it resembles courtly love. Ficino justifies this view by

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claiming that likeness generates love, for the lover’s soul becomes like a mirror of the beloved. Ficino’s law of reciprocal love gains currency in Neoplatonic love poetry. This would present a problem for anyone who receives unwanted attention. Doctrines of love in literature and myth confirm that love is only given freely; it cannot be coerced, constrained, or demanded with threats. The ladies in the dialogues of Andreas Capellanus discuss the topic and provide witty répliques to problematic scenarios. In Scève’s time, Pernette du Guillet provides her own réplique in epigram 35 of the Rymes: Si j’ayme cil, que je debvrois hayr, Et hays celuy, que je devrois aymer, L’on ne s’en doit autrement esbayr, Et ne m’en deult aucun en rien blasmer. Car de celuy le bien dois estimer, Et si me fuict, comme sa non semblable: Mais de cestuy le plaisir trop damnable M’oste le droict par la Loy maintenu. Voila pourquoy je me sens redevable, A celuy là, qui m’est le moins tenu.64

Pernette argues against mandatory reciprocity: she is not to blame if she hates one whom she should love, and prefers to be bound to one not bound to her (tenu can signify debt or devotion), rather than one to whom she is bound by law (her husband). The first quatrain of Pernette’s dizain acknowledges the unpredictable, unmanageable nature of one’s affections toward another, which may defy social convention. “Loy” seems to refer to legally sanctioned marriage. Pernette asserts her prerogative (droict) to choose her love, rather than being constrained by rules. For Dante (in the Vita nuova and rime petrose), Petrarch, Scève, and others, a law of reciprocity in love would support their eloquent pleas as devoted poet-lovers. If we accept Ficino’s distinction between simple and reciprocal love, we find that death may be a consequence of either kind of love: the former, due to the proverbial broken heart; the latter, because the love is forbidden or destroyed by external circumstances; alternatively, the lovers are transformed. Other literary works, such as Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and tales from the Decameron, explore how lovers can destroy each other and themselves. We return to the idea of the devastation of the experience linking love and death. Perhaps the lovers cannot attain union; they remain two individuals in body and mind. In order for rebirth, resurrection, or union to occur, something must be destroyed in

64 This epigram bears affinities with Héroët, La Parfaicte Amye, I, vv. 302–9.

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transformation. Passion can be a destructive and overwhelming force, and many, including Ficino, evidently found it disturbing. Love lyric evokes pain and pleasure, love and hate, harmony and conflict (concordia discors). Scève’s dizains manifest these themes. The god of love has figured in amatory evocations since antiquity. Perhaps capriciously or vengefully, Amor wounds his prey, unsuspecting gods or mortals, with his arrows, which cause one to fall in love; he causes even Apollo, god of reason, to pursue Daphne. The conceit of Amor’s arrows expresses the sense of inevitability and destabilizing loss of self-control when one falls in love, because the lover does not choose rationally. Plato’s Phaedrus presents the prospect of rational choice in love. What happens is outside the purview of reason. In this scenario, the lover is dominated by passions rather than will and reason. The ancient Greeks were wary of the passions, which they considered dangerous because they were irrational and could lead to uncontrolled destruction and madness. Like dreams, mystical experiences, and poetic frenzy, the passions exist outside the domain of reason and logic. Cavalcanti recognizes this. Dante illustrates and condemns it in Inferno 5 with the tempest representing the chaotic passions beyond the control of the will. Cavalcanti and Dante wrote in the wake of early thirteenth-century Sicilian poets, who in turn had borrowed from the troubadours. The theme of death emerges in thirteenth-century Italian love lyric. The lyric poetry of Cavalcanti and Scève manifests the theme of death within the phenomenology of love. For Cavalcanti and Scève, death frequently menaces at the threshold just beyond the love-suffering that destabilizes them, along with fear of loss of individual identity. There is a condition that distinguishes Dante (with Beatrice) and Petrarch from Cavalcanti and Scève: the poetry of the latter two evokes for the reader an imagined involvement over time with the beloved lady, favors likely having been granted, and the suffering emerges from the evocation of that transfigurative experience and from longing, rather than from lament about an imagined involvement. The poet is not merely admiring her from afar with unrequited longing, as occurs in Petrarch’s poetry: in other words, it is all in the imagination, or as Gordon Braden has succinctly put it, “In Petrarch, nothing happens.”65 In the poetry of Cavalcanti and Scève, there are clues about the intensity and torment of a love affair. In a canzone of Dante’s rime petrose, a violent sexual scene is developed between the poet and an unnamed woman. In the Vita nuova and Commedia, however, there is no mention of sexual consummation between Dante and Beatrice. Fulfilment of sensual desire is not indicated in Petrarch’s

65 Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, 24.

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poetry either, although the longing is expressed obliquely. Such fulfilment is incompatible with Laura’s chastity and inaccessibility. Constructions of meaning that refer to death are more disquieting in Cavalcantian verse than in the refined and sophisticated Petrarchan verse. Although Petrarch frequently refers to “morte” as a theme, it becomes a rhetorical device more than conveying intensity. For example, he writes of a new composition he is preparing: “S’ Amore o Morte non dà qualche stroppio / a la tela novella ch’ora ordisco” (If love or death does not cut short the new cloth that now I prepare to weave: Rvf 40.1–2). The death theme in the poems of Cavalcanti and Scève evokes a dark undertow, intrinsic to love, desire and union, and not developed for the purpose of elegiac eloquence or poetic renown. In Dante’s rime petrose and Inferno 5, amorous passion is linked to death, and the canto contains moral condemnation since the figures are damned in Hell, in the circle of the lustful. In Inferno 2, Virgil recounts to Dante the pilgrim how Lucia exhorted Beatrice to aid her devoted lover, who was close to death: “Non odi tu la pieta del suo pianto, / non vedi tu la morte che ’l combatte [?]” (Do you not hear the anguish in his tears / Do you not see the death besetting him?: Inf. 2.106–7). The topos of the lover who is near death due to desire for his beloved recalls troubadour lyric, and justifies the lover’s request for the lady’s mercy. For Scève, love transcends death, even with intense suffering: “Qu’ Amour a joinct à mes pensées vaines / Si fort, que Mort jamais ne l’en deslie” (D 22.10). In this dizain, the poet denigrates himself and asserts eternal union with Délie, even as he wanders among the shades of the dead. In dizain 194, Scève addresses a Délie who is not satisfied to let her virtue shine for the world, one who is surrounded by tombs of the dead sacrificed to appease her, as the menacing Greek goddess Hecate, one of Délie’s lunar metamorphoses, representing the new moon in darkness: N’as tu horreur, estant de tous costez Environnée et de mortz, et des tombes, De veoir ainsi fumer sur tes Aultez Pour t’appaiser, mille, et mille Hecatombes? (D 194.6–10)

Cavalcanti writes, as mentioned, of love’s power in “Donna me prega”: “Di sua potenza segue spesso morte” (Death often follows on [love’s] potency; line 35). Elsewhere in his lyric poetry, Cavalcanti evokes an image of love that is initially pleasant and exhilarating but quickly leads to pain and despair. In the sonnet “Li mie’ foll’ occhi, che prima guardaro,” he writes of the place “nel fero loco ove ten corte Amore” (where Love holds his cruel court: V, 4), and others inform him: “Fatto se’, di tal, servente, / che mai non déi sperare altro che morte” (You have become a servant of hers, so now you must expect nothing but death: V, 13–14).

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Cavalcanti’s poetic persona is subordinated to the unnamed lady, and his fate is sealed. The lady has enormous power over the poet-lover to give life or death, and he cannot withstand it. This is comparable to Scève’s poet-lover. Gianfranco Contini has characterized the Cavalcantian conception of love as “amore come vita-morte” (life-death, or a living death).66 Scève’s persistent thematic association of love with death is similar. Cavalcanti writes, “c’ha volta Morte dove assai mi spiace” (she [Fortune] has directed Death to where it gives me great pain).67 André Pézard writes of Cavalcanti: “son caractère était fier et secret, son lyrisme est gracieux et fort, mélancolique et parfois sombre; l’amour est pour lui une puissance fatale, incompréhensible à toute philosophie.”68 For Cavalcanti, since love is located in the sensitive part of the soul, the lover is susceptible to desire, not reason. Scève writes in his huitain, “les Mortz qu’en moi tu renovelles / Je t’ay voulu en ceste Oeuvre descrire” (lines 3–4). Les morts is in the plural, indicating that the experience is repeated as a pattern. Elsewhere, Scève identifies Délie as “celle en qui mourant je vis” (D 7.2). The poet lives and dies repeatedly: living because Délie wants him to, in order to love and suffer, while the suffering overwhelms and extinguishes him. The strange symbiosis between the two characters is analogous to Cavalcanti’s “vita-morte.” Scève writes: Et me tuant, à vivre il me desire, Affin qu’aimant autrui, je me désaime. Qu’est-il besoin de plus outre m’occire, Vu qu’assez meurt, qui trop vainement aime? (D 60.7–10)

The recurrence of “les Morts” expresses this as well. Scève’s love for Délie renews his life; indirectly, she renews deaths in him. Petrarch often refers to death in the Canzoniere, and in one sonnet, to “morti” (plural), but the usage is not the same: “mi vedete straziare a mille morti” (you see me torn asunder by a thousand deaths: Rvf 44.12). There is no erotic connotation, but a straightforward analogy with death in war, specifically defeat by Love’s arrows. In La belle dame sans mercy, Alain Chartier uses deaths in the plural to evoke love-suffering prior to attaining one’s desire: “[l’amoureux] pourroit mourir de mille mors / Ainchoiz qu’ataindre a sa plaisance” (vv. 143–44). This corresponds to the Scevian conceit of suffering deaths for love, and to Bernart de Ventadorn’s poem “Non es meravelha s’eu chan” cited earlier concerning the poet-lover’s repeated deaths for love.

66 Gianfranco Contini, “Guido Cavalcanti,” in Letteratura italiana delle origini (Florence: Sansoni, 1976), 159. 67 Guido Cavalcanti, canzone XXXIV, “La forte e nova mia disaventura,” line 21. 68 André Pézard, trans., Oeuvres complètes de Dante, Vie Nouvelle (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1965), 12, note 14.

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Poets used figurative language to designate life-energy in the body. Spiriti (spirits) were vehicles representing emotions, faculties, or life-energy. Aristotelian pneuma, meaning breath, whose Latin equivalent was spiritus, located in the heart, was the locus of contact between body and soul.69 Cavalcanti was the first Tuscan poet to draw this image from the philosophy of Aristotle and Galen and apply it to poetry.70 Dante also made use of spiriti, initially in the Vita nuova in referring to the “spirito di vita,” and Petrarch, less so: for Petrarch, the spiriti tended to carry a lighter meaning, such as signifying a sigh or a word of praise.71 In Cavalcanti’s verse, a spirito can arrive, signifying the onset of a mood or emotion, or depart, indicating the poet feels he is near death. Cavalcanti writes, “Amore ruppe / tutti miei spiriti a fuggire” (Love put to rout all my spirits: IX, 13–14). There are occurrences in Scève’s Délie72 of Cavalcantian-Dantesque spiriti in the plural, rendered as esprits: for example, “Bien qu’en ce corps mes foibles esperits / Ministres soient de l’aure de ma vie / Par eulx me sont mes sentements periz” (D 379.1–3). In the first dizain of Délie, Scève writes, “vivant le corps, l’esprit desvie” (D 1.8). The French verb desvier, from the Latin deviare (to diverge from the path), also signifies “to die,” “des-vier”; the verb might come from Marot.73 Thomas Hunkeler notes that Scève reverses the concept of the spirit (or soul) surviving bodily death, and here the body survives but the esprit is struck.74 The esprit here is the life force, and the innamoramento almost destroys it. This finds affinity with the intensity of Dante’s encounter with Beatrice, but perhaps even more so with Cavalcantian love.

Virtue The concept of virtue preoccupies Scève, Ficino, Dante, and Petrarch. Virtue is a major theme in Scève’s poetry, evidenced by the subheading of the title Délie, “object de plus haulte vertu,” and by the frequency with which the term vertu is used in the text: forty-seven times (plus fifteen if one includes linguistic variations, for example, plural, adjectival, and adverbial forms of vertu). The French vertu, like 69 John Freccero, “The Firm Foot on a Journey without a Guide,” in Dante and the Poetics of Conversion, 41. 70 See Massimiliano Chiamenti, “The Representation of the Psyche in Cavalcanti, Dante and Petrarch: The Spiriti,” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 71–81. 71 Hunkeler has examined stilnovo and Petrarchan uses of spiriti and sospiri (sighs); see Vif du sens, 199–207. 72 See Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 146 sq. 73 Marot, “Deploration de Florimond Robertet,” line 298, “ains que le corps desvie,” quoted in Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, 14, note to D 1. 74 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 150–51.

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the Italian cognate virtù (with Trecento variants virtude, virtute, and vertù), derives from the Latin etymon virtus, which like virilis is formed from vir (“man”). The Greek equivalent is arete (“excellence,” “virtue”). Virtus for the ancient Romans was a man’s attribute, good character manifested through actions: valor, strength, force, bravery, courage, and excellence.75 The epic hero embodies virtue and is admired for it. A parallel use of virtue implied an intrinsic quality; what makes a man worthy also becomes an identifying characteristic: thus, in alchemy, a substance’s “virtues” determine its identity, classification, and uses. This meaning extends also to the locutions “by virtue of,” en vertu de (par le pouvoir de, according to the Dictionnaire Robert), and “in/per virtù di” (in forza di, Dizionario Zingarelli). Virtue signifies power and essence, whether literal or figurative. The virtue of a thing is what constitutes its value; virtue is a specific capacity.76 The word’s common secular meaning passes into the vernacular languages: the French word vertu, attested from 1080 onward,77 signifies man’s bravery and strength, later encompassing wisdom and mental qualities. Sébillet’s poetic treatise Art poëtique françois (1548) opens with the importance of vertu for poetry and the arts. In Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and others, virtue possesses a moral connotation, defined in reference to good and evil, with virtue being the means to attain happiness, in the quest for the good. The four secular cardinal virtues are courage, justice, prudence, and temperance. According to Aristotle and his successors, one must attain all four virtues to manifest them perfectly (unity of the virtues), implying practice of them, not merely possession. Virtue is associated with perfection, an impossible but appealing ideal. In Dante’s Vita nuova and Commedia, and in Scève’s Délie, we find virtue linked with perfection, in accordance with the attributes of Beatrice and Délie, respectively. Dante calls Beatrice “regina de le virtudi” (queen of virtues: VN 10.2). When Dante the pilgrim reaches the summit of Purgatory to meet Beatrice, he sees a procession with seven dancing nymphs personifying the four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues (Purg. 29.121–132). The concept of virtue shifts in Christianity, but continues to designate a positive quality of human character, associated with the good or with worldly strength. The three theological Christian virtues are not concerned with warrior valor, but are faith, hope, and charity (from Paul’s epistle, 1 Cor. 13:13). Women are candidates for manifesting these virtues. However, women are not conventionally

75 See A. E. Andrews, Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 76 André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues [Petit traité des grandes vertus] (Paris: PUF, 1996), trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 2. 77 “Vertu,” in Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (Paris: Le Robert, 1967, 1994).

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models for the secular virtues; these are reserved for men. Mary, who embodies for Christians faith, hope, and charity, as well as modesty, is subordinated to Christ in the Christian hierarchy. Mary does not represent a masculine model in worldly affairs for secular virtues, implying strength of character and values contrasting with faith, hope, and charity. Concerning women, virtue becomes an attribute associated with chastity and modesty (to be defended valorously). In the late fourteenth century, the treatise of Philippe de Mézières appeared, Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (ca. 1385–1389) and the Livre des trois vertus (1405), the sequel to Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des Dames. Bourgeois and upper-class women were not generally independent and autonomous, but were members of family structures and social hierarchy. Social, cultural, legal, and religious expectations limited women’s choices. A woman author, such as Christine de Pizan or Pernette du Guillet, was unusual. A woman’s “virtue” (defined in terms of sex: chastity if she was unmarried, fidelity to the husband in marriage, and constant modesty) reflected on male dignity and pride, and on family status. If the woman was known to transgress sexual boundaries, her reputation and that of her family were affected. In such a climate, secrecy often flourished. In juxtaposition with societal mores, virtue in a courtly context was linked to nobility of character rather than class. One had more control over one’s character than one’s rank. The virtuous of character were considered to be the most fit for love. Virtue was linked with courtoisie, and the greeting was an initial sign of courtesy, as Dante illustrated in the Vita nuova. In sixteenth-century France, virtue was conceived as a moral quality of character worthy of praise through humanist epideictic rhetoric, after Cicero and Quintilian, and was a proper subject for literature.78 In his treatise L’Art poëtique (1555), Jacques Peletier du Mans upheld Vergil’s Aeneid as a model. Virtue in a man accorded nobility for all others to imitate, and this informed the literary project. According to Scipion Dupleix (and Francesco Piccolomini),79 moral action should be guided by honnesteté and bien séance, although these two could be inconsistent and might bring about contradictory outcomes. Thus, in France, the medieval seigneur evolved to become the honnête homme, an elite creature of the court. In Italy, the cortegiano of Castiglione was more concerned with appearance, reputation, and performance than with intrinsic virtue. André Comte-Sponville has argued that politeness and good manners are the gateway to the other virtues, although politeness is but a representation of virtue, rather than intrinsic virtue itself (there is no difference between seeming polite and being so).80

78 Ullrich Langer, Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu, 11–13. 79 Langer, Vertu du discours, 14. 80 See Comte-Sponville, Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, 7–15.

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With the etymology and connotations of virtue in mind, let us examine the concept as it presents itself in the lyric poetry of Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. What does vertu signify in Délie? In Scève’s poems, vertu encompasses a range of meanings with roots in classical, Neoplatonist, courtly, and stilnovo sources. Virtue signifies the ideal, the pure, the perfect. Virtue is the stated object of the poet’s desire, desire for erotic and spiritual union with the beloved lady. Although he can manifest virtue, he cannot become virtue itself. The poet can produce something of virtue, which recalls Diotima’s speech recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium (203c–212b). According to Socrates, mediated through Diotima, love is compelled to engage in reproduction in beauty, a means to attain immortality. This reproduction involves the physical body, producing children, or the soul. True virtue is produced in beauty (Symposium 212a). Scève gives birth to the poetry, named Délie. She embodies virtue, existing within the dizain sequence. The separation between Scève and Délie (as mostly inaccessible lady, and as text) precludes their synthesis. A lover cannot physically become his beloved (nor his text), save in imagined metaphors of union. Two physical bodies are envisioned via the text, and the poet-lover expresses desire for Délie as a beautiful lady. Scève designated virtue as an intrinsic quality, the intense essence of a thing, its very core, by repeating the concept as one inside another, in mise en abyme: âme de mon âme, vie de ma vie, vertus de sa vertu, and so forth. This could express through language the Neoplatonic correspondence of microcosm-macrocosm, in which the individual soul forms part of the universal soul. It recalls rhétoriqueur and troubadour techniques. How can virtue-as-chastity coexist with the erotic? In the poetic context, virtue can inspire desire: desire for the lady, desire for closeness and union, desire to attain an ideal. If a lover seduces a chaste lady, her chastity is eliminated. The air of forbidden temptation and secrecy enshrined in courtly love contributes to erotic desire. Dante seeks to reform the human, earthly, sensual aspect of love through purification in Purgatory. Virgil explains to the pilgrim, “Amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute / e d’ogne operazion che merta pene” (Love is the seed in you of every virtue / and of all acts deserving punishment: Purg. 17.104–105). Each human being is supposed to use free will to choose good actions. Dante uses amor to designate love rather than the more consistently Christian carità. According to the passage, amor can lead to good or evil; in the Commedia, the term covers broad contexts, including spiritual and cosmic love. We see the lady’s virtues praised in Cavalcanti’s verses, for example in sonnet IV: “a le’ s’inchin’ ogni gentil vertute, / e la beltate per sua dea la mostra” (every noble virtue inclines toward her, and beauty displays her as its goddess: lines 10–11). The sonnet is a public laudation of the inaccessible lady, as worship more than seduction, and it concludes that “we” (her admirers, those around her) are not worthy or blessed

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enough to know her. Dante and Scève establish a strong link between love (as amor or amour) and virtue (virtute, vertu). If desire in love is unconsummated (as with Petrarch and Laura), the poet can draw upon an endless resource to generate the love poetry, in which an amorous involvement does not play out across time. Although Délie is associated with the virgin huntress Diana/Artemis, she is also envisioned as married and in bed with her husband (D 161). This renders the notion of chastity symbolic and figurative for Délie. Délie is not an innocent young girl. The poet expresses jealousy and an anti-marital stance in keeping with courtly love: “Vyole amour par ce lien injuste” (D 161.7). The marital bond, considered conventional and legitimate by the church and society, exerts a stabilizing force that Scève undermines in this dizain. Paradoxically, the legitimate bond of husband and wife becomes “injuste” and an abomination, whereas the secret, subversive bond between the lovers is the proper one according to love. Courtly love accommodates the state of adultery: the legends of Tristan and Iseut, and of Lancelot and Guinevere, serve as paradigms of courtly love in medieval romance. And as Andreas claims in De arte honeste amandi, true love cannot exist within marriage, but must be pursued outside it (part VI, seventh dialogue). For Andreas, the god of love demands that a lady should embrace the golden mean between the extremes of rejecting every potential lover and accepting any who seek her love. Jean de Meun expresses negative views concerning marriage via interlocutors in the Roman de la rose. In a courtly milieu, virtue rests on values of chivalry, whose conception of marriage presents a veneer of Christian morality. Fidelity is displaced from the marital bond to lovers, which undermines the social legitimacy of marriage. It is essentially a system of non-Christian origin. Here, virtue is close to the ideal of courtoisie, whose rhetoric becomes increasingly sophisticated and codified in the early modern period, culminating in the Cortegiano (Venice, 1528) of Castiglione; this type of virtue carries through to the idea of the aristocratic honnête homme of classicism. Aristocrats are supposed to serve as models for society to admire. The lady is praised as virtuous, but if her virtue-as-chastity is strictly maintained, she will spurn her hopeful poet-suitor, as Laura does with Petrarch. In the title Délie object de plus haulte vertu, Délie manifests “highest” virtue. The substantive “obiect” points to the goal for the poet to attain, which is simultaneously Délie, virtue, and the poetic sequence. The title of the 1544 edition of Délie did not contain a definite article, appearing as DELIE / OBIECT DE / PLUS HAULTE VERTU.81 With the poet’s tendency to use dense, polysemic language,

81 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 237.

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Délie could refer to the lady, and also metonymically to Scève’s dizain sequence about her: the lady’s virtue and the poetry’s virtue. Thomas Hunkeler remarks: “Le recueil scévien est en effet construit à l’image de la dame: c’est à sa dureté que répond la dureté des epygrammes, c’est à sa vertu que répond la vertu de l’oeuvre.”82 Besides deftly analyzing the correspondence between poetry and the beloved, Hunkeler juxtaposes vertu with dureté, which are linked in the poetry of both Scève and Dante. In the second canzone of the rime petrose, Dante writes: “la sua bellezza ha più vertù che petra” (her beauty has more power than a precious stone: line 19). The precious stone metaphor is similar to Guido Guinizzelli’s passage on love in his canzone “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (To the noble heart love always repairs):83 Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende come vertute in petra prezïosa. (Love’s fire catches in the noble heart, Like the power of a precious stone.)

The initial mention of virtue in Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rvf 2.5) refers to Petrarch’s own virtue, rather than Laura’s, at the moment of the innamoramento: “Era la mia virtute al cor ristretta” (my vital power was concentrated in my heart). Petrarch attributes virtue as onestade to Laura. Rvf 29 refers to “onestade” (chastity) in the seventh stanza, preceding the stanza that mentions virtue. The attributes of onestade and vertù manifest in Laura, and preclude amorous involvement with the poet-lover. Rvf 29 reveals a double meaning: “qual cella è di memoria in cui s’accoglia / quanta vede vertù, quanta beltade / chi gli occhi mira (. . .)?” (what cell of memory is there that can contain all the virtue, all the beauty that one sees who looks in her eyes [. . .]?). Petrarch’s praise of Laura’s beauty and virtue is expressed because the poet perceives them; his own memory is sufficient to retain those attributes so as to write about them, despite the rhetorical claim of inadequate ability to do so, since the words would be reductive in relation to the intended meaning. Still, Petrarch praises Laura in his poems, and himself in the process. Unlike Scève, whose use of vertu is strongly associated with Délie rather than himself, Petrarch frequently uses virtue to refer to his own strength, and as an inherent quality. Scève, Cavalcanti, and Dante write mainly with an earnest tone. This tone distinguishes their respective works from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, whose tone is

82 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 237. 83 Dante alludes to this canzone of Guinizzelli as a source for Inferno 5, particularly for Francesca’s discourse to the pilgrim.

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sophisticated, urbane, and elegant: the text as a self-contained system. Aldo Bernardo remarks, “For Petrarch it was the glitter and beauty of the surface of poetry that mattered most.”84 Petrarch’s poetry is not hermetic, obscure, or difficult, nor does it hint at the unsayable, as can be said of the poetry of Scève, Dante, and Cavalcanti. Interpretation and knowledge are required to understand difficult poetry’s most profound meaning. Dante writes: O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani, mirate la dottrina che s’asconde sotto ’l velame de li versi strani. (Inf. 9. 61–63) (O you possessed of sturdy intellects, observe the teaching that is hidden here beneath the veil of verses so obscure.)85

Dante’s words indicate that wisdom is couched in secrecy, with interpretive effort required to access it; not everyone can understand. Obscurity in verse serves a purpose: to screen out the unworthy. Cavalcanti writes in the envoi of “Donna me prega”: “assai laudata sarà tua ragione / da le persone c’hanno intendimento: / di star con l’altre tu non hai talento” (your argument will be greatly praised by those persons who have understanding: You have no desire to be with the others: XXVII, 73–75).86 While Cavalcanti and Dante set forth rhetorical filters to exclude some readers, consistent with trobar clus, Petrarch’s disdain is classbased, with scorn for the common people who gossip about him. Scève’s Délie bears Neoplatonist influence, whereas concerning the expression and consequences of erotic desire, Scève diverges from Ficino in the latter’s rejection of volupté, and instead aligns with troubadour poets, Cavalcanti, and Dante. Ficino incorporated motifs of Cavalcanti and Dante into his trattato d’amore. The resulting syncretism blended Occitan fin’amor and stilnovo with the Neoplatonic system. Virtue was a common theme in the work of these poets. Festugière writes, “Ainsi se fit une fusion entre les goûts et les sentiments des seigneurs et des dames et la doctrine ficinienne.”87 Scève’s conception of love is at times dark and disturbing like Cavalcanti’s, including motifs of death. The repeated evocation of death serves as a vehicle for the poet to express intense passion and suffering caused by longing for union with the lady.

84 Aldo Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” PMLA 70 (1955): 497–98. 85 Translations of quotes from Dante’s Commedia are by Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez, from their bilingual three-volume edition of the Commedia. 86 English translation of Cavalcanti is by Lowry Nelson. His bilingual edition, The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, essentially reproduces the Favati-Contini text established in 1960. 87 Festugière, Philosophie de l’amour, 37.

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A final, symbolic death corresponds to the silence beyond the last poem. Only in the imagination does the idea of death recur and acquire tremendous symbolic force beyond extinction of the body: it implies destabilization of the self, loss of identity, loss of one’s bearings. The prospect of the poet’s death demonstrates the magnitude of his love for the lady: it threatens his very existence. Scève’s conception of love fuses elements common to Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Ficino, and themes of virtue and death are integral to it. Scève diverges from Petrarch in his conception of virtue, and in the Tuscan’s guilt over his excessive love, linked to his quest for poetic achievement and renown.

4 Scève and Dante: “Fedeli d’amore” The second half of the Quattrocento witnessed a resurgence of interest in stilnovo poetry. The Raccolta aragonese (1476) gathered important Tuscan poetry from the Duecento to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Lorenzo’s Comento de’ miei sonetti contributed to this development; the latter’s proemio lauds Dante’s poetry and Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega” concerning love.1 Our understanding of the dolce stil novo movement was shaped by Dante, mainly in his Vita nuova, De vulgari eloquentia, and in Purgatory 24 through the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca (ca. 1220–1296). Bonagiunta explains that the god of love (Amore) dictates to the poet, rendering his poetry legitimate and true because it comes from love. While the idea of the poetic inspiration of Love is a topos of courtly lyric, Dante articulates it in specific terms and identifies himself as belonging to the stilnovo group more clearly than anyone had previously. According to Mario Marti in the article “Stil nuovo” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, it is not only the idealization that may be expressed in verse that is dolce (sweet); death, anguish, and fear may be expressed with dolcezza as well. Cavalcanti accomplishes this as a stilnovista, although the sentiments themselves are not necessarily dolci at all. The line from Scève, “ce mien doulx tourment” (D 114.5), describes the poet’s torments as sweet. This illustrates the antithesis of sweet suffering: one desires the object of love and finds the separation unbearable. In his unfinished Latin treatise De vulgari eloquentia (composed ca. 1303–1305),2 Dante sets forth a defense of the “illustrious” (illustre) vernacular, asserting the primacy of poetry over prose. According to Marianne Shapiro, Dante presents the vernacular as “exiled” like the poet himself.3 Long before the rise of Florentine Neoplatonists including Ficino, who studied him, Dante declares that the rational part of the human soul, the highest and most noble part, seeks the good. For Dante, love for Beatrice is not excluded from the schema of the good. In DVE 2.2, Dante quotes Occitan and stilnovo love poets as models, having established that love is a “worthy” (dignum) subject for poetry. To the three parts of the soul–vegetative, sensitive, and rational–correspond the three things the soul seeks, which are “the useful” (utile), “the pleasurable” (delectabile), and “the 1 See Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 196–99. 2 DVE English trans. Steven Botterill, Dante, De vulgari eloquentia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 Shapiro writes: “Since the ‘illustrious vernacular’ migrates from one shelter to another, it carries the baggage of a generous vernacular culture and moves freely within the confines of the Romance ‘idiom’. . . The substantial unity of the Romance vernaculars endured and penetrated throughout Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise”; DVE, Dante’s Book of Exile, 5–6. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-005

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good” (honestum). For Dante, the three major goals of these categories are “wellbeing” (salus), “love” (venus) and “virtue” (virtus); thus, these are the most important subjects for noble treatment in vernacular poetry. In treatments of love, appropriate emphasis points to ardor (amoris accensio). This is exactly what Scève develops in Délie, and it is Dantesque. There is no indication in DVE that ardor in love is negative, sinful, or lamentable; in courtly tradition (and in ancient Roman love poetry), it is not. As a suitable example of love poetry, in DVE, Dante cites verses of Arnaut Daniel, the troubadour who practiced trobar clus and who addresses Dante the pilgrim in Occitan at the end of Purgatory 26. Scève emphasizes repeatedly in Délie the good (bien) he seeks (for example, D 133, D 152, et passim), the virtue (vertu) he perceives in Délie, object de plus haulte vertu, and the ardeur of love. This is Dantesque vocabulary; Beatrice leads the pilgrim from the good to the more exalted, “di bene in meglio” (from good to better: Par. 10.38). The word that most frequently occurs in Délie (after common grammatical articles and prepositions) is bien: 192 times. Scève also seeks to attain vertu through the refining of his poetry, for which the subheading would signify Délie, meaning his collection of dizains, the book itself being the object of highest virtue. Both meanings for Scève’s Délie are in keeping with Dante’s principles in DVE, in which salus, venus, and virtus are noble and worthy subjects for vernacular poetry. Many have remarked that the Vita nuova is a treatise for poets, by a poet, on the art of poetry.4 DVE and VN are poetic treatises then, with implications for our readings of Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. Dante’s views on love evolve from the Vita nuova (1294) to the petrose canzoni (1296) to the four trattati (of fifteen planned) that comprise the unfinished Convivio (1304–1307) and to the Commedia (ca. 1304 until Dante’s death in 1321). In the Convivio, Lady Philosophy triumphs rather than Beatrice, and mind prevails over heart. This is inconsistent with Beatrice in the Vita nuova and Commedia, and has given rise to speculation among scholars.5 Dante writes

4 In his introduction to De vulgari eloquentia, Steven Botterill quotes Barbara Reynolds from her Penguin edition of the Vita nuova. 5 See Richard Lansing’s article and bibliography on the Convivio in the Dante Encyclopedia; for example, Pietrobono and Nardi suggested that Dante later revised the Vita nuova ending to accommodate the Commedia, and that Dante’s professed love for philosophy in the Convivio constituted a sort of heretical straying from the true path, which could account for the selva oscura imagery at the beginning of the Inferno. Lansing writes, “It should be stressed that in the Convivio Dante never explicitly sets reason in opposition to faith or philosophy against theology. His goal . . . is forever one of synthesis, of bringing together, or at least correlating, diverse systems of thought” (230). According to Maria Corti, the inconsistencies are insoluble. To attempt to force each work to conform to a schema or ideology is to invite misinterpretation; philosophers, writers, and poets evolve in their work.

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in book I of the Convivio: “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” (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: Conv. 1.2.16).6 This statement about vertù likely influenced Ficino’s De amore treatise, because we find a similar emphasis on virtue in his formulation of the nature of love (De amore IV, 5). Dante’s statement about virtue being his motivation is consistent with Scève’s preoccupation with virtue and Délie, the poet’s object de plus haulte vertu, and his poetic sequence opens with a rejection of conventional motifs such as Cupid’s arrows. Scève’s evocation of love is not intended to be frivolous or charming. Dante composed the Vita nuova between 1292 and 1295; his first literary work circulated in manuscript form among his friends. Manuscript copies circulated after the spread of printing in Europe, and Vita nuova manuscripts were probably available in Lyon during the 1520s and 1530s, part of Italianate culture. Bernardo di Giunta’s anthology (1527) of Italian lyric included the thirty-one poems of Dante’s Vita nuova. Stilnovo poems were included in the 1545 printed edition of Petrarch dedicated to Scève by Jean de Tournes in Lyon. Scève was familiar at least with the lyrics of the Vita nuova, if not the entire text. The Vita nuova is somewhat autobiographical, and springs from medieval Occitan traditions of vidas and razos: as a prosimetrum, the Vita nuova contains poetry and prose including self-commentary, in which Dante glosses his own verses. The work is dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante identifies as primary among his friends, “primo di li miei amici” (VN 3.14). At its outset, Dante identifies the Vita nuova as a “libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere” (a book of memory before which little could be read: VN 1.1). Inscribed in its pages is the memory of his love for Beatrice, and his spiritual journey through that experience. Dante writes, Incipit vita nova (here begins the new life: VN 1.1): the narrator’s life is transformed by his encounter with Beatrice, his innamoramento. Scève also marks his existence through the encounter (innamoramento) with Délie; what occurred before Délie becomes irrelevant, his jeunes erreurs (D 1.1). Dante first mentions Beatrice with the epithet “la gloriosa donna de la mia mente” (the glorious lady of my mind: VN 2.1), preceding the passage in

6 Dante, Convivio 1.2.16; English translation is from the Princeton Dante Project website, etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/convivio.html.

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which Dante discusses the innamoramento. The adjective “gloriosa” indicates that Beatrice is already dead, residing in heaven and in the poet’s memory.7 Petrarch initiates his Canzoniere with a sonnet emphasizing memory, as Dante emphasizes memory in the VN. However, the memory of Petrarch’s poetic persona is full of regret, shame, disappointment, and past suffering from his love for Laura. In the initial poems of Délie, we find a series of Dantesque echoes. In the huitain, Scève announces his intention to write of renewed deaths, “les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles” (line 3), rather than amatory commonplaces: erotic desire caused by Venus (“ardentz estincelles,” line 1), and Cupid’s arrows (“les traictz,” line 2).8 Scève dedicates his work to Délie, with the possessive in the thirdperson singular: “à sa Délie” and not “à ma Délie.” He also uses the secondperson indirect pronoun, the intimate “te,” as the destinataire (to Délie? Pernette? Love? the reader? to himself?) in an instance of Scevian obscurity: “je t’ay voulu . . . descrire” (line 4). Perhaps the poet writes with awareness of his distinct persona created by the verses, as the one who addresses sa Délie. The poet writes with intent to publish; thus the work is composed with a broader audience in mind, although the tone reveals apparently intimate sentiments about his love. Scève’s poetic persona addresses his lady (private readership), and his readers (public readership). Like Dante in the Vita nuova, Scève comments here on his own poetic production. Scève writes in the same huitain that Amour witnessed his composition and refined his poems, identified as epigrams, with flames. Thus, personified Love is mentioned in reference to the poetry itself, which stems from Scève’s love for Délie, rather than Love being the catalyst for Scève’s innamoramento. Love, in the way of Plato’s Symposium, allows Scève to reproduce in beauty, giving birth to the poetry. At this point, love presides over the literary creation, rather than the innamoramento. Délie is the dizain collection, refined in the flames of love. We saw previously that the “object de plus haulte vertu” for Scève to attain is Délie, at once the eponymous name for the dizain sequence and the beloved lady, so that vertu signifies Délie the lady and the poet’s own work (or Délie as literary creation). By the same token, Dante in the Vita nuova “actualizes the identification of love and poetry, whereby the woman is the perfect image of the loved one and the perfect allegory of poetry,” according to Giuseppe Di Scipio.9 Délie is Scève’s perfect loved one, integral to the poetry as “dur” and 7 On the implication of “gloriosa,” see Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 7. 8 Scève does write of Cupid’s arrows, but manages to avoid a “hackneyed” manner, as McFarlane put it. 9 Giuseppe Di Scipio, The Presence of Pauline Thought in the Works of Dante, 22.

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“de plus haulte vertu.” Amour is distinguished from Cupido in Scève’s huitain, perhaps as a means to separate poetic composition from human passion, though in the concept of fureur poétique or divine inspiration, the two may fuse into one experience. Love burns away the impurities of the poems, making them hard: durs Epygrammes (line 6). This evokes labor more than inspiration, though if Love is present, then Love provides the motivation to compose. Scève seeks to describe les mortz, but the phenomenon is due to love (Amour). The metaphor for composition is borrowed from the metalworking forge, as illustrated in the huitain’s “ardentz estincelles.” In alchemy, impurities are burned away until only the pure substance remains. Alchemy represents purification, refinement, and transformation. Guido Guinizzelli of Bologna (1230?–76), whom Dante considered his poetic father and the first stilnovo poet, used two metaphors, that of fire and precious stone, to discuss love in his best known canzone, “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (To the noble heart love always repairs), included in the giuntina anthology of Italian lyric. The second stanza reads as follows: Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende come vertute in petra prezïosa, che da la stella valor no i discende anti che ’l sol la faccia gentil cosa; poi che n’ha tratto fòre per sua forza lo sol ciò che li è vile, stella li dà valore: così lo cor ch’ è fatto da natura asletto, pur, gentile donna, a guisa di stella, lo ’nnamora. (Love’s fire catches in the noble heart, Like the power of a precious stone Whose potency does not descend from the star Until the sun makes it a noble object: After the sun has drawn out Everything base with its own force, The star confers power on it. In such a way, a lady, Like the star, transforms the heart Chosen by Nature and made pure and noble.)10

10 English translation by Robert Edwards, The Poetry of Guido Guinizzelli, 20–25.

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Guinizzelli likens the power of love to flame and precious stone. He uses vertute to insist that only a person of noble heart, “a vertute” (disposed to virtue: line 38), is worthy of love, not necessarily one of noble birth. In a seminal poem, Guinizzelli deploys tropes about love later developed by Dante and Scève, among others. Petrarch, like Dante, mentions Guinizzelli as an illustrious poetic predecessor in the Triumphus cupidinis.11 Guinizzelli uses fire and heat to symbolize the coexistence of love and nobility in the heart: “prende amore in gentilezza loco / così proprïamente come calore in clarità di foco” (love takes its place in true nobility as rightly as heat in the brightness of fire: lines 8–10). In the canzone’s congedo (envoi), Guinizzelli, unlike Petrarch, refuses to be condemned for the presumption of falling in love and idolizing the lady more than God. Guinizzelli argues that the lady resembled a heavenly angel, and therefore “non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza” (it’s not my fault if I fell in love with her: line 60). Guinizzelli was a lawyer, after all. Guinizzelli’s allusion to “vano amor” (line 54) in the congedo corresponds to the stance adopted by some troubadours, and subsequently Guittone d’Arezzo and Petrarch, justifying the renunciation of the beloved. Guinizzelli’s assimilation of religious adoration for God and adoration for the beloved lady prefigures Dante’s love for Beatrice that is sustained in the Commedia and sanctioned in Paradise. Guinizzelli employs stone imagery twice in his poem: with precious stone, “petra prezïosa” (line 12), and with “adamàs del ferro in la minera” (diamond in a vein of ore: line 30). In the first case, the stone is purified and suffused with value by the heat of the sun (fire), and in the second, it is hidden, revealed by mining. Precious stones were prized for their quality (virtue) of hardness. Guinizzelli indicates in the second stanza, cited above, that the noble heart is purified by the lady, his love for her constituting her power over him. As mentioned, Dante develops the analogy in the rime petrose between the hardness of verses and the hardness of stone, in response to the hardness of his stony lady’s heart. It is Dante in Purgatorio 26 who adapts the idea of refining the poet in fire, and by extension refining the poetry in fire, via poets of the seventh terrace in the circle of the lustful. The poets must enter the flames to be purified. This may be Dante’s way of correcting his predecessors, as poets do with

11 Petrarch writes, “Ecco i duo Guidi che già fur in prezzo” (Here were both Guidos, held in high esteem: TC IV, 34). The two Guidos are Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti. Petrarch echoes Dante in Purg. 11.97–98: “così ha tolto l’uno a l’altro Guido / la gloria de la lingua” (So did one Guido, from the other, wrest the glory of our tongue). See notes in Pacca and Paolino’s edition of Petrarch’s Triumphus Cupidinis, in Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 190–91.

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one another’s art.12 In Vita nuova 20, Dante pays tribute to Guinizzelli’s poem “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (To the noble heart love always repairs), calling him “il saggio” in the second line of the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (Love and the gentle heart are one thing), and in Inferno 5 through the words of Francesca da Rimini, who distorts Guinizzelli’s words. Dante refers to Guinizzelli in Purgatorio 11 and 26. In De vulgari eloquentia, he called Guinizzelli “maximus Guido” (DVE I, 15.6), but Dante clearly intended to surpass him. In Scève’s huitain, les mortz could imply erotic climax or intense suffering (such suffering is developed in Délie), but could also denote an experience so overwhelming it virtually annihilates the personality, as the mythical Semele was burned to cinders by the sight of Zeus. Besides the poetry, the body is also burned up as a result of the intensity: “Car telle ardeur le coeur en a receu, / Que le corps vif est jà reduict en cendre” (D 13.5–6). This indirectly recalls Semele, who was destroyed by her desire to see the divine form of her lover. Semele is mentioned twice in the Commedia, in Inf. 30 and Par. 21, but not in Petrarch’s lyric poetry. Dante has Beatrice explain to him that if she showed him the full radiance of her smile, he would be burned to ashes by her beauty: “S’io ridessi, . . . tu ti faresti quale / fu Semelè quando di cener fessi / ché la bellezza mia . . . tanto splende” (If I were to smile . . . you would become like Semele when she turned to ashes, for my beauty . . . is so radiant: Par. 21.4–6 and 10). Dante is the mortal, and Beatrice immortal. The motif depicts beauty and force (virtue) so intense it destroys the body. In Scève’s huitain, the poetry, and in other verses the body, is subjected to the flames. Dorothy Coleman writes of Scève’s huitain that “The poem is not Christian at all.”13 Scève opens his sequence with a tone that contrasts with Petrarch’s initial sonnet in the Canzoniere. The motif of the burning heart recalls the burning heart in Dante’s dream vision early in the Vita nuova. McFarlane comments, “The lady’s grace will penetrate his heart and reduce his body to ashes, and ultimately the lofty virtues of Délie will—and perhaps especially after physical separation—bring the poet back to calm and spiritual elevation.”14 Dizain 367 alludes to Délie’s arms as “mortellement divins” (line 9) when they embrace the poet-lover, bringing death and irresistible pleasure.

12 Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot, and others have written on the ambitious struggles poets have with the achievements of their predecessors. Scève has been interpreted as correcting Petrarch’s errors, which incorporates a pun based on the use of “jeunes erreurs” in D 1 and Petrarch’s “giovenile errore” of Rvf 1. See Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” in Pre-Pléiade Poetry, 112–24. 13 Coleman, Poet of Love, 25. 14 McFarlane, Délie, 33.

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At the end of the first dizain, we read of Délie the “Constituée Idole de ma vie” (D 1.10). Délie is placed above the poet, as Beatrice is elevated by Dante. Beatrice is considered miraculous, as one who came from heaven: “venuta / da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare” (VN 26.7–8);15 this may be inspired by extravagant stilnovo praise of the beloved lady. Scève hints that Délie also is miraculous and from heaven: “[on] la diroit descendue des Cieulx” (D 44.8), the poet-lover “admirant sa mirable merveille” (D 7.6). For Dante in VN 24, Beatrice seems to become a figura Christi,16 whereas in my reading Délie does not for Scève, nor does Laura for Petrarch. The idolatrous way that Dante wrote of Beatrice in the Vita nuova could have been scandalous for its sacrilege, had the text been widely accessible to readers beyond Dante’s circle of fellow poets.17 Whereas Scève’s form of “idolatry” employs aesthetic, mythological, and Neoplatonic references, Dante’s version in the Vita nuova and Commedia persistently identifies her as being a divine, extraordinary figure, and Dante’s salvation (salute). Cavalcanti used “salute” as well, in reference to an unnamed lady, but in a negative construction, a sort of metaphysical salute mancata. In sonnet IV, which begins, “Chi è questa che vèn” (who is this one who comes), Cavalcanti expresses wonder: “non si pose ’n noi tanta salute, / che propriamente n’aviàn canoscenza” (never was such beatitude granted us / That we could really have knowledge of her: lines 13–14). In the opening section of the Vita nuova, when Dante first encounters Beatrice (whose name is linked with the Italian beatitudine, from the Latin beatitudo, and from beato/a, the Latin beatus, “happy and blessed”), his spirito animale says to him, “Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra” (Now has appeared your beatitude: VN 2.6).18 Dante’s spirito naturale begins to weep, lamenting the suffering to come (VN 2.7). The early moment immediately brings emotional devastation rather than joy. Scève’s initial experience of the innamoramento likewise is not joy and exaltation, but devastation: “l’Esprit desvie” (D 1.8), even as the body lives. New life occurs after death in a cycle of renewal, which is one sense of Dante’s vita nova: new life via transformation in love, following initial devastation. Scève refers to béatitude as well (in D 3.10, cited infra). Scève writes,

15 Quoted in Di Scipio, Pauline Thought, 19. 16 See Di Scipio, Pauline Thought, 16. 17 See Robert Pogue Harrison, “Approaching the Vita Nuova,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., 35–36. See also Charles Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 3–5. Singleton points out that in the later sixteenth century, Dante’s use of terms like “salute,” “gloriosa,” and “beatitudine” in reference to Beatrice were considered so blasphemous that in the 1576 Florence edition of the Vita nova, those words were changed to “quiete,” “graziosa,” and “felicità,” respectively. Scève wrote in Lyon three decades earlier of adoring Délie as “idole de ma vie.” 18 The Dantean spirits were in the habit of speaking Latin.

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“Amour au sort de mes malheurs insere, / Affoiblissant mes esperitz plus forts” (D 398.3–4). He expresses the overwhelming experience of love, which brings both joy and sorrow, with the same trope of personal “spirits.” Like Dante in the Vita nuova, Scève in dizain 3 juxtaposes exaltation and suffering: Ton doulx venin, grace tienne, me fit Idolatrer en ton divin image Dont l’oeil ignoramment meffit Pour non preveoir à mon futur dommage. Car te immolant ce mien coeur pour hommage Sacrifia avec l’Ame la vie. Doncques tu fus, ô liberté ravie, Donnée en proye à toute ingratitude: Doncques espere avec deceue envie Aux bas Enfers trouver beatitude. (D 3)

Scève justifies his idolatry of Délie by emphasizing her grace (if Christian grace, it would verge on blasphemy), which is also “doulx venin” (the Petrarchan “dolce veneno,” Rvf 152.8), poisoning him. Such potent language would be illsuited to Christian piety, along with “dieux” and “Pandora” in dizain 2. It would be sacrilegious for a man to worship a mortal woman as a goddess: Scève is her lover, and he does not write of such intense erotic desire for her as a substitute for the Virgin Mary; the poetry is not a vehicle for religious devotion. A further parallel with Dante’s Vita nuova also occurs in dizain 3, which refers to Scève’s heart being immolated: “Car te immolant ce mien coeur pour hommage / Sacrifia avec l’Ame la vie” (D 3.5–6).19 Scève balks at the prospect, due to anticipated ingratitude from Délie that would render the sacrifice a great waste. Dizain 163 forms a sequel to dizain 3: Délie seems to accept Scève’s sacrifice out of compassion more than responding in kind to his passion (“celle grand’passion,” line 7). His heart is tied up, but the knot can now be loosened. He concludes, “Tu me receus pour immolée offrande” (D 163.10). Scève alludes to the heart burning for Délie in dizain 13.5-6, cited above, and infra for the full dizain. As Délie receives Scève’s heart, so too does Beatrice receive Dante’s heart in the poet’s dream in the Vita nuova. Petrarch does not use the verb immolare in his vernacular poetry. René Girard and Jacques Derrida have perceived sacrifice as being foundational to the sacred.20 The troubadours presented themselves as martyrs to love,

19 In their respective editions of Délie, Parturier, McFarlane, and Joukovsky do not explain the heart immolation or “béatitude” in their notes on D 3; Defaux notes that the victim is willing. 20 Concerning René Girard (1972) and Jacques Derrida (1992) on medieval motifs of sacrifice including the eaten heart, see Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 25–26.

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and sacrifice demonstrated the matter’s gravity: when a poet-lover gives his heart to his lady, it is a gesture of paramount importance, proving his love. This is how Dante treats it in the Vita nuova. If we were to conceive of Petrarch’s sacrifice (or martyrdom) for love, it would be a conceit even within the constructed space of the poetry, for Laura does not appear to be an individual lady, but a composite of idealized attributes and abstract symbolism; she is absent and undeveloped as a literary character, and Petrarch withdraws his devotion at the end, transferring it to the Virgin Mary (Rvf 366). He persistently emphasizes his own poetic glory, to receive the lauro and immortality via fame. His ostensible sacrifice might be his interior emotional life spent in vain devotion to an ephemeral lady and in composing eloquent lyric about his love. Perhaps the renunciation of Laura for the sake of his own salvation is Petrarch’s sacrifice in the end. Defaux compares Scève’s immolation motif to Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, I Cor. 5.7, which mentions Christ immolated (Latin immolatus).21 In Christian liturgy, Jesus becomes the sacrificial lamb, although the passage in dizain 3 does not conform well to Christian theology, because the poet-lover is not essentially a Christ figure, and Délie does not need to partake of divinity, since she is already like a goddess, nor does she need to be saved like Christ’s disciples; he is not sacrificed to redeem anyone from sin. The Eucharist would be distorted, whereas the dynamic becomes a generic sacrificial offering (also a pagan rite). Délie could represent divinity, to whom the sacrifice, perhaps a self-sacrifice, is dedicated. With the medieval development of the Marian cult, Christians prayed to Mary, but they were not supposed to sacrifice to her. The central Christian ritual of the Eucharist was not celebrated in honor of Mary. In dizain 1, Scève writes of “piteuse hostie” (line 9), implying the sacrifice of his spirit and soul is still insignificant and inadequate when compared to Délie’s greatness. Scève employs language and symbols borrowed from religion (hostie, sacrifier, immoler, coeur, âme) as metaphors to articulate the experience of love. This vocabulary infuses the poetry with intensity and vividness. It should not be conflated with religious poetry. Its symbols are common to mythological, pagan, or folklore sources that present episodes of sacrifice to symbolize great love or offerings to the divinity to obtain some desired result. The hostie, representing the flesh of Christ, is consumed as part of the Eucharist. The dynamic of sacrifice is present in dizain 3. The theme of ritual sacrifice is not unique to the Christian religion, and poetic syncretism combines traditions. Prometheus, who figures in dizain 77, and the phoenix mentioned in other dizains and illustrated in emblem 11, “de mort à vie,” are

21 See Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, 19, note to D 3.5.

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pagan figures of sacrifice and renewal, the cycle of death and life. If Christian symbolism were the exclusive or predominant source of the figurative language in Délie, then the poetry would be consistently devotional or theological. But it is a sequence of love poems to a lady who is not the Virgin Mary, with a rich variety of sources and spiritual motifs. Religious symbols and references are transformed through poetic imagery. The heart immolation passage in dizain 3 finds a parallel in Dante’s dream vision in Vita nuova 3, in which Love, holding Beatrice in his arms, induces her to eat, hesitatingly (“dubitosamente”), Dante’s flaming heart (VN 3.5–7). Dante does not use the verb “immolate” here, but instead “mangiare” twice (VN 3.6). However, a sacrifice involves immolation, and the underlying purpose is often to provide a form of sustenance and to placate the deity. Love, presented as a lord, dominates the scene that Dante witnesses. The lady ingests the lover’s heart as a token of his love and total devotion to her. The heart is flaming because Dante is burning with love for Beatrice. This love, like Scève’s ardeur, is to be refined and purified later in purgatorial flames. In the sonnet “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,” which recapitulates the episode of Vita nuova 3 with the dream of the flaming heart, Dante writes that after Beatrice was made to consume the flaming heart, Love turned away weeping: “appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo” (afterward I saw him turn away weeping: line 14). This expression of grief corresponds to Scève’s devastation at the innamoramento: L’oeil, aultresfois ma joyeuse lumiere, En ta beaulté fut tellement deceu, Que de fontaine estendu en ryviere Veut reparer le mal par luy conceu. Car tel ardeur le coeur en a receu, Que le corps vif est jà reduit en cendre: Dont l’oeil piteux fait ses ruisseaulx descendre Pour la garder d’estre du vent ravie, Afin que moyste aux os se puisse prendre, Pour sembler corps, ou umbre de sa vie. (D 13)

The heart literally burns up as a result of tremendous heat and the body is reduced to ashes. Thereafter, the body is but a shade, perhaps destined for the second circle of Hell among the doomed lovers. Only the water of tears holds together the ashes to keep them from scattering entirely, and water cools fire. These are medieval motifs used to describe love in lyric and narrative. A version of the Prometheus myth of the creation of humanity recounts that Prometheus used his own tears rather than water to form the bodies of

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mortals.22 Elsewhere, Scève develops the topos of burning fire and cooling tears, for example when Amour, weeping just as he does in Dante’s VN 3,23 induces “ma Maistresse” to weep also, and Amour gathers the tears in a sponge to offer as relief to the poet-lover: “Voicy, dit il, pour ton ardeur estaindre” (D 302.7). But instead of cooling water, the poet receives more fire: “En lieu d’humeur flammes elle rendit” (D 302.10). In another dizain, Scève writes of his heart being wounded by the power of Délie’s gaze: “l’oeil, qui feit à mon coeur si grand’playe” (D 5.10). This reinforces the heart’s immolation mentioned in dizain 3. The heart is wounded, burning up, immolated—in other words, it is consumed by love of Délie. Scève associates his heart with flames and burning: “Mon coeur alors de la fornaise umbreuse / Ouvre l’Etna de mes flammes ardentes” (D 356.5–6). The flaming heart episode in Dante’s Vita nuova represents the phenomenon of love in terms of the physical body, with the heart as the seat of the passions: the spirits reside there, and the lover’s life force is transferred to the beloved. A sexual interpretation is possible for Dante’s vision of Beatrice consuming his heart, which, with the vision at the end of the Vita nuova, manifests a progression from sensual love to spiritual love, and from uncertainty to conviction.24 The immolation and ingestion of the heart in a situation involving lovers is a commonplace of medieval legend.25 According to Marcello Ciccuto,26 the motif of the ingested heart is of Celtic origin, and it appears in the Tristan of Thomas, and in the Roman du Chastelain de Coucy. It was linked with troubadours,27 such as Sordel lamenting the death of Blacatz, and Guilhem de Cabestanh: in his vida, his heart is cooked and served by Raimon de Castel Roussillon to his beloved by the jealous husband.28 Boccaccio used it in the Decameron, in the tale of Ghismunda and Tancredi (4.1), and in the tale of the knights Guiglielmo Guardastagno (Guilhem de

22 See sections on Prometheus in chap. 5, “Mythologie Grecque,” in Mythologie Générale, 126–28. 23 Dante writes that Amore appears as “uno segnore di pauroso” (VN 3.3), rather than as a child, like “l’Enfant” (D 302.5). Dante’s characterization is close to Cavalcanti’s (see Ciccuto’s note 26, p. 94 in his edition of the Vita nuova), as well as the god of love in the Roman de la rose, a grand seigneur. 24 See Michelangelo Picone’s article “Vita Nuova” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 874. 25 See, e.g., Le coeur mangé: Récits érotiques et courtois, XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Danielle Régnier-Bohler (Paris: Stock, 1979). 26 Ciccuto’s notes to the passage in chap. 3 are found in Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984). 27 See Tommaso Casini’s notes to chap. 3 in his edition of Dante’s Vita Nuova (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), 11–12. 28 Elizabeth W. Poe, “The Vidas and Razos,” in Handbook of the Troubadours, 185.

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Cabestanh) and Guiglielmo Rossiglione (Guillaume de Roussillon) and the latter’s wife (4.9), set in Provence. In each story, love gives way to violence and brutal death. Boccaccio’s tale 4.9 derives from the legend evoked in the writings of Guilhem de Cabestanh, a probable source for Boccaccio.29 Tragic lovers are reunited in death, and may be viewed as martyrs to love. Prior to Ficino and the dissemination of Neoplatonic ideas about lovers dying and being reborn in one another, medieval folklore, a collective cultural resource for poetry and tales, produced visceral images of the lover’s heart being ingested by the beloved to illustrate a conception of love involving literal consumption and nourishment, leading to death, or following death. The grisly rite can signify a distorted reenactment of physical, sensual union via ingestion of the lover’s vital bodily organs.30 In a seventeenth-century variant of the folkloric eatenheart motif associated with sexual potency, Giambattista Basile in his fairy tale collection in Neapolitan dialect, Lo cunto de li cunti (The tale of tales, 1634–1636), writes of Iannone, a king who is instructed to have a virgin cook a sea dragon’s heart for his queen to consume for fertility, in tale 1.9, “La cerva fatata.” In Dante’s text, the consumption of the heart occurs in a dream vision: real yet unreal, vivid and imaginary. It is the ultimate sign of devotion: sacrifice of one’s heart (and therefore life) to the lady. No one can live without a heart, and a heartless person cannot love. The heart is the seat of life from a medical and symbolic perspective.31 The folkloric legend has polygenetic analogies in other cultures across the world of anthropophagy and is pagan in origin, whether Celtic or originating from some other region. It would seem to me that the young Dante in the Vita nuova, having encountered Beatrice who greeted him courteously, has a vision involving a modified version of the medieval coeur mangé motif, a love triangle with the husband who kills his wife’s lover and feeds the heart to her. The god of love, a figure of authority who tends to address Dante in Latin, feeds Dante’s flaming heart to a reluctant Beatrice while Dante is still alive, a master of ceremonies for the scene. Love indicates his intent to rule over Dante, as if this heralded a new religion: “Ego dominus tuus” (I am your master: VN 3.3).32 Dante is the lover, and his love and heart are alive (flaming, emitting heat and light, in a vivid and terrifying image). Dante’s

29 Simon Gaunt discusses the legend in Love and Death, 77–79. 30 Peter Greenaway’s intense film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” (1989) contains themes of forbidden love, books, murder, revenge, and the cooking and consumption of a lover’s body. 31 See Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 32 Robert Pogue Harrison argues that the god of love in the VN is an impostor who dispenses bad advice: see “Approaching the Vita Nuova,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., 39.

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heart (symbolizing passionate love) becomes part of Beatrice’s body through ingestion via the order and mediation of Love. Love compels Beatrice, who is naked, covered in a drappo sanguigno (VN 3.4), to accept Dante’s love, which constitutes Dante’s fervent desire, but also one that obligates him to comport himself in accordance with that momentous act. Henceforth, Dante is inexorably and intimately united with her, since ingestion implies combining in union the bodies, energies, and attributes, creating an irrevocable connection: the physical embodiment represents metaphysical union, even soul-union, and sexual union. The essence of sacrifice involves a deliberate physical act performed with symbolic significance to compel a response. Beatrice dies young, and perhaps the passage prefigures her death, as critics have surmised: Love, no longer joyous but now weeping, bears Beatrice verso lo cielo, toward heaven (VN 3.7). But that subsequent circumstance does not fully elucidate the dream, and it is understandable that perhaps Dante did not wish to explicate it in writing, if its sexual nature would breach propriety. Dante’s dream is not a Christian expression of piety. Dante explains that the heart is associated with appetite, and the soul with reason (VN 38.5). The vision accords with Cavalcantian imagery, though apparently, at the time, Cavalcanti, when consulted, did not clarify the meaning of Dante’s vision recounted in the work dedicated to his primo amico. Perhaps Dante’s “conversion” (new direction and focus) in the Vita nuova concerns engagement with a different kind of poetic production, beyond the troubadour mode with personifications of Love, self-absorption, heart symbolism, and tropes of unfulfilled desire exploited for the generation of verses, a mode Dante found insufficient for his ambitions.33 This would explain the personage of Love being eclipsed, under whose guidance Dante’s fidelity to Beatrice wavered, which the poet subsequently found unsatisfactory. A possible biblical source for the heart episodes in dizain 3 and Dante’s Vita nuova is the book of John. Jesus says to the people, “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:55–56)34 (Vulgate: “caro enim mea vere est cibus et sanguis meus vere est potus. qui manducat meam carnem et bibit meum sanguinem in me manet et ego in illo”).35 The passage essentially proposes anthropophagy, without specifying the heart or particular organs, with the understanding that the act of ingestion was conducted using bread and wine, and thus the flesh and blood were symbolic and not literal (while the 33 I have Menocal and her interpretation of Singleton in mind; see Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth, 42–47. 34 Biblical translation is from the RSV, 1946, 1971 for the New Testament. 35 Vulgate, John 6:55–56.

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Catholic doctrine of transsubstantiation insists that through a mysterious miracle, the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ). When the disciples are baffled at Jesus’s words, murmuring among themselves, “durus est hic sermo” (this is a hard saying: Vulgate, John 6:61), Jesus directs them in interpreting his words, telling them to heed the spirit rather than the flesh. The term durus is comparable to Scève’s durs Epygrammes: both discourses are difficult, requiring interpretation, and both endure. The consumption of another’s flesh becomes a way to commemorate and to bring about union: the two become one flesh, and one abides in the other. This idea is transposed to the situation of lovers, where the act of ingesting a beloved’s heart signifies and affirms the bond between them, and forges a special connection that is manifested in the flesh. A correspondence exists between the ingested substance and the one who consumes it. The bond might be forged in death: if one ingests the other’s flesh, especially the heart, then death is present. As for Scève, dizain 3 presents the sacrifice in his lyric sequence, and Scève (or his heart, the hostie to be consumed) expresses his devotion to the lady and their special bond. As in Dante’s Vita nuova, the heart episode is both real and unreal. The heart is the seat of passionate love, and central to the life of the body; thus Dante’s life force is irrevocably transferred to Beatrice, just as that of Scève is received by Délie. Through the process of reception, ingestion, and absorption, Dante abides in Beatrice, and Scève in Délie; a bond is created between the two sets of bodies, and their souls are symbolically united in love. This union of lovers is also symbolized by the flowing together of the rivers Rhône and Saone at their confluence (D 17 and 346). It is a coincidence that dizain 3 and VN 3 share the number three, for the Vita nuova chapter divisions date only from the eighteenth century, and have been called into question. However, both works evoke a love triangle (trinity configuration) with love as intercessor, lover, and beloved. Following another vision, Dante resolves at the end of the Vita nuova not to write about Beatrice until he finds the best way to exalt her: “io vidi cose che mi fecero proporre di non dire più di questa benedetta infino a tanto che io potessi più degnamente trattare di lei” (I saw things that made me resolve to write no more of this blessed one until I could more worthily treat of her: VN 42.1). Dante’s intense desire for Beatrice, expressed in the Vita nuova through the vehicle of courtly love and Beatrice’s consumption of his flaming heart, is partly sublimated into love and adoration for Beatrice as a celestial figure in Purgatorio and Paradiso. Dante expresses different views on love in a subtly erotic passage of the petrosa canzone “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra” (To the short day

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and its great arc of shadow), in which Dante imagines having a young lady dressed in green in a meadow surrounded by high hills: ond’io l’ho chesta in un bel prato d’erba, innamorata com’anco fu donna, e chiuso intorno d’altissimi colli. (lines 28–30) (and so I have wished to have her in a fine meadow of grass, as much in love as ever lady was, a meadow closed in all around with high hills.)

While this lady is never identified as Beatrice, this passage shows that Dante is not averse to expressing ardent desire. While the outcome of the imagined scene is left unsaid, the erotic desire is implicit, not sublimated or disguised as some other sentiment. Dante expresses no guilt for his love here. The petrose poems are closer to Cavalcanti’s definition of love than Dante’s other works, and they are also a source for Petrarch, as Robert Durling has shown.36

Stylistic sweetness and hardness Dolcezza, a quality both of poetic style and of the lady, may be juxtaposed with bitterness, sorrow, or hardness (durus, dur, duro): The lady’s refusal of the poet who loves her is hard. The poetic style of Dante’s rime petrose and Scève’s “durs Epygrammes” is hard. Dorothy Coleman writes, “The facilità and dolcezza that Petrarch had in writing lyric poetry stands at the opposite pole from Scève’s durs Epygrammes . . . [B]y being dur Scève was deliberately turning away from the dolcezza of Petrarch and the Petrarchists, and using the Roman term [durus] to mean the seriousness of the poet of high-style love.”37 This hardness of style accords with obscurity, posing interpretative challenges for readers. In book 6 of the Aeneid, Vergil writes of “hard” (durus) love and death. The Sibyl describes a section of the Underworld: “quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit” (those whom harsh love destroyed with cruel death: Aen. 6.442).38 Dante echoes this in the circle of the lustful when he writes, “ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille” ([shades] departed from our life because of love: Inf. 5.69). Dante demonstrates in Inferno 5 that love brings harsh consequences indeed. Hardness of poetic style for Dante and Scève signifies difficult interpretation stemming from 36 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, appendix 2, pp. 612–29, reproduces the four rime petrose with English translations. See also Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal (1990). 37 Dorothy Coleman, Poet of Love, 50. 38 Durling and Martinez, eds., Inferno, 5, note to line 69.

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Occitan trobar clus style, and contrasts with Petrarch’s dolce style. In the canzone “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel), Dante refers to his mental hardness, implying strength of resolve: “la mente mia ch’è più dura che petra / in tener forte imagine di petra” (mind harder than stone to hold fast an image of stone: 12–13). Petrarch’s evocation of hardness is more plaintive: he makes himself a Niobe figure, as if he were a weeping statue. He writes: “pietra morta in pietra viva / in guisa d’uom che pensi et pianga et scriva” (a dead stone on the living rock, like a man who thinks and weeps and writes: Rvf 129, 51–52). In the last poem of the Canzoniere, he describes himself as “un sasso d’umor vano stillante” (a stone dripping vain moisture: Rvf 366.111–12). This is lament, not hardness signifying determination, concentration, or durability. The incipit of Dante’s fourth petrosa canzone expresses the intention to be harsh: “Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro” (my emphasis). This rhetorical stance corresponds to that of Scève in Délie. Dorothy Coleman writes of Scève: “His poetry will be hard and rough, not blurred or indefinite. It will not flow smoothly as Petrarch’s does.”39 For his part, Petrarch writes: “Però ch’Amor mi sforza / et di saver mi spoglia, / parlo in rime aspre et di dolcezza ignude” (Since Love forces me and strips me of all skill, I speak in harsh rhymes naked of sweetness: Rvf 125, 14–16). Petrarch renders explicit his rhetorical use of “aspro” because Love deprives the poet of his skill, which is ironic. The disparity between asprezza and dolcezza modifies the poetic conceptions of love. Thomas Hunkeler has examined passages in Bembo and Speroni concerning their respective rhetorical styles; the asperitas style is found also in Quintilian.40 According to Hunkeler, Scève views Dante as a love poet and rival for Petrarch, rather than the Dante who composes the Commedia: “[L]e Dante auquel Scève pense en Délie n’est pas l’auteur de la Divine Comédie, mais plutôt le poète d’amour avec lequel Pétrarque rivalise.”41 Perhaps this imposes a division that need not exist, for Petrarch and Scève could not have avoided the Commedia as a poetic achievement. The Commedia does not conform to love lyric in genre or structure, but the journey to Dante’s beloved, Beatrice, is integral to it. The lover is exalted in his love, as the troubadours envisioned. While Dante is (not exclusively) a love poet, it would seem that Scève takes into account the Commedia in Délie as well as love poetry, including via motifs of hardness, difficulty, and obscurity.

39 Coleman, Maurice Scève, Poet of Love, 51. 40 Hunkeler, “Dante à Lyon,” 15 (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, IX, 4, 142), and 17–18 (Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue and Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua). 41 Hunkeler, “Si durs epygrammes: l’obscurité de Délie et la leçon de Dante,” in L’Énigmatique à la Renaissance: formes, significations, esthétiques (Paris: Champion, 2008), 133.

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Scève refers to hardening with an erotic subtext: Toutes les foys, que sa lueur sur Terre Jecte sur moy un, ou deux de ses raiz, En ma pensée esmeult l’obscure guerre Par qui me sont sens, et raison soubstraictz. Et par son teinct Angeliquement fraiz Rompt ceste noise à nulle aultre pareille. Et quand sa voix penetre en mon oreille, Je suis en feu, et fumée noircy, Là où sa main par plus grande merveille Me rend en marbre et froid, et endurcy. (D 358)

In her incarnation as the cool moon, Délie throws down her rays and destabilizes the poet, whose violent inner struggle (l’obscure guerre, la noise) between his reason and passion is renewed. Délie’s body and physical presence, voice, and hands affect the poet: her voice causes him to burn, and her touch turns him to cold marble. For Dante in the canzone of the rime petrose “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel), the hard, cold marble is located within the lady’s heart. He addresses his poem in the congedo: Canzone, or che sarà di me ne l’altro dolce tempo novello, quando piove amore in terra di tutti li cieli, quando per questi geli amore è solo in me, e non altrove? Saranne quello ch’è d’un uom di marmo, se in pargoletta fia per cor un marmo. (RP 1.66–72) (Song, now what will become of me in that other sweet fresh season, when love rains down on the earth from all the heavens, if through these freezings love is only in me and not elsewhere? It will be with me as with a man of marble, if in a tender girl there is a heart of marble.)

The hardness and coldness of the marble corresponds to the hardness of the lady’s heart, associated with endurance (the English terms endurance, endure, and during are cognates of the French dur, dureté, from the Latin durus), and eternity, which, like stone, is unyielding, unchanging, absolute. In dizain 125, Scève locates hard marble within the lady, using tomb imagery: “Ensevely long temps soubz la froideur / Du Marbre dur de ton ingratitude” (D 125.1–2). For the lover, cold implies rejection and separation, in opposition to ardor and love. The cold marble tomb corresponds to the coldness of the lady with a heart of marble.

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Scève’s image of the cold tomb diverges from the burning hot tombs of heretics in Dante’s Inferno (Inf. 9.118–20). However, the core of Dante’s Hell, Cocytus, inhabited by Satan, is freezing cold (Inf. 34), contrary to the fiery tenth heaven of the Empyrean. Scève’s dizain 125 mentions Purgatory and the Dantesque theme of the lady’s marble-like hardness. Délie is accused of being crueler than the experience of passing through Purgatory, and the poet-lover imagines being condemned to receive her ingratitude as confinement in a cold marble tomb. Délie’s stony ingratitude is akin to the stony, unresponsive lady in Dante’s canzoni (the rime petrose). Purgatory in this dizain is perhaps harsher than Dante’s conception of Purgatory, which was more optimistic than conventional portrayals.42 Here, pain and bitterness outweigh hope.

Petrarch’s views of Dante Petrarch’s assessment of Dante constitutes an important episode in the reception of Dante’s work prior to Scève.43 Petrarch’s epistle to his friend Giovanni Boccaccio discusses a certain popular unnamed poet (Familiares 21.15, written between 1353 and 1361):44 First, you excuse yourself to me, and not idly, for seeming to have spent much time on the praises of our fellow countryman—vernacular in his language but beyond doubt noble in his theme—and you excuse yourself as if I considered either his or any other man’s praises a derogation from my own.45 (. . .) So you realize it is both odious and ridiculous for some fellows to have invented my supposed hatred of him when there is no ground for hatred, but much for affection: that is

42 See introduction to Durling and Martinez, eds., Purgatorio, esp. 9–10. 43 In Commentary and Ideology (1993), Deborah Parker focuses on the Renaissance reception of Dante’s Commedia through commentaries including Landino, Daniello, and Vellutello. For a book-length treatment of Petrarch’s views on Dante, including a survey of the relevant scholarship, see Baranski and Cachey, eds., Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (2009). 44 I have quoted the Latin and translation from the bilingual edition of Francesco Petrarca, Selected Letters, translated by Elaine Fantham, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 314–329. Aldo Bernardo discusses this letter in “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” 488 sq. 45 Primum ergo te michi excusas, idque non otiose, quod in conterranei nostri—popularis quidem quod ad stilum attinet, quod ad rem hauddubie nobilis poete—laudibus multus fuisse videare; atque ita te purgas quasi ego vel illius vel cuiusquam laudes mee laudis detrimentum putem. (Fam. 21.15, §1)

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our country, our paternal friendship, his genius and his way of writing, the best of its kind, which guarantees him wide immunity from contempt.46 (. . .) Yet what appearance of truth does it have that I should envy the man who devoted his whole life to this kind of poetry to which I barely granted the flower of my youth, so that what was to him, if not his only skill then surely his finest, was to me just play and consolation? What room is there here, I ask, for envy or the suspicion of it?47

Petrarch devotes an eloquent passage of several pages to a discussion of what he ironically calls a minor matter.48 The author vigorously denies feeling envy for the poet, who is evidently Dante Alighieri, yet Petrarch reveals a profound preoccupation with his poetic predecessor, whom he had seen once as a child. Petrarch’s Florentine father, the notary Ser Petracco, was exiled from Florence in 1302, a few months after Dante.49 Petrarch did not reside in Florence. The ambitious Petrarch could not denigrate Dante openly, which would be a revealing move against a renowned literary and intellectual icon. Petrarch would appear resentful of Dante’s undeniable accomplishments, which he denigrates in subtle ways. Petrarch claims in this letter to avoid owning a copy of the Commedia to prevent imitation, as if it would contaminate his own writing, which he wanted to stand on its own merits. He seeks to put Dante behind him, as if Dante were only part of an early stage in Petrarch’s poetic development. Through backhanded compliments, Petrarch attempts to put distance between his work and Dante’s: he implies there were better poetic models and goals to come; Dante was no doubt noble for his theme (sowing uncertainty and doubt); Petrarch cannot admire and praise Dante’s talent and style, the best of its kind (“in suo genere optimus”): the category segregates the poetry, which cannot compete openly for merit. Raising the poet far above contempt does not indicate sincere admiration. The criticism that Dante sought glory applies also to his critic and rival. Petrarch claims not to scorn this poet, to whom he would readily grant the palm for vernacular eloquence (“ut facile sibi vulgaris eloquentie palmam dem”), whereas the gesture is hypothetical (the verb dare

46 Odiosum ergo simulque ridiculum intelligis odium meum erga illum nescio quos finxisse, cum ut vides, odii materia nulla sit, amoris autem plurime, et patria scilicet et paterna amicitia et ingenium et stilus in suo genere optimus, qui illum a contemptu late prestat immunem. (Fam. 21.15, §9) 47 Quam tandem veri faciem habet ut invideam illi qui in his etatem totam posuit, in quibus ego vix adolescentie florem primitiasque posuerim? ut quod illi artificium nescio an unicum, sed profecto supremum fuit, michi iocus atque solatium fuerit et ingenii rudimentum? Quis hic, precor, invidie locus, que ve suspitio est? (Fam. 21.15, §21) 48 Fam. 21.15, §19. 49 Nicholas Mann, Petrarch, 4.

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appears in the subjunctive); no prize is actually granted.50 We know that Petrarch considered Latin eloquence superior to vernacular eloquence, evident in his crowning as poet laureate in Rome in 1341 for the Latin epic Africa. Petrarch scorns praise of Dante by the ignorant common people. Petrarch focuses on vernacular eloquence and style in evaluating Dante’s Commedia, in accordance with his epistle and his own vernacular poetry: the Canzoniere is a Tuscan model of excellent style, with emphasis on the polished surface. Aldo Bernardo believed that Petrarch, until the end of his life, considered Dante to be a “vernacular stylist.”51 Dante and Petrarch both admired Vergil, but for different reasons: Petrarch’s admiration stemmed primarily from stylistic and aesthetic appraisal of Vergil’s poetry, and Petrarch cast doubt on the magical and prophetic powers attributed to Vergil during the Middle Ages.52 Dante’s substantial engagement with Vergil’s poetry, and most significantly with the Aeneid, is complex: besides numerous textual echoes and allusions to Vergil’s poetry, the Commedia incorporates characteristics of ancient epic (for example, the hero journeys to the underworld, the work’s ambitious subject deals with the political order, and the poet solicits divine inspiration); Dante inserts a pagan poet into a Christian poem, to serve as the pilgrim’s guide.53 Scève diverges from Petrarch’s emphasis on polished vernacular style (while Petrarch denounced empty versification).54 For Petrarch, poetry is essentially formed with meter, fiction, eloquence, and allegory.55 Scève’s dizains lack the Christian underpinnings of Petrarch’s lyric or Dante’s Commedia. Petrarch considered the Triumphi, composed in terza rima, to be his vernacular magnum opus, and did not denigrate it as he did the Canzoniere.56 Concerning Dante and Petrarch in their handling of style and meaning, Aldo Bernardo comments: The allegory of the Triumphs represents an actual reversal of that of the Comedy. Dante . . . produces a surface which is simple but an underlying meaning which is extremely

50 Fam. 21.15, §13. 51 Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” 493. 52 See Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” 496 sq. 53 Early commentators found Dante’s pagan guide Virgil problematic; Dante meant the historic poet Vergil (Inf. 1.67–75), not an allegorical figure such as Reason. For a summary and bibliography of the importance of Vergil for Dante, see Robert Hollander’s article “Virgil” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 862–65. Hollander (1993) did a “census” of Vergil’s textual presence in the Commedia. 54 See Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” 498 and note 26. 55 Petrarch, Fam. 10.4. 56 For “magnum opus,” see Petrarch, Seniles 5.2, in contrast to “nugae” and “fragmenta,” cited in Zygmunt Baranski, “The Triumphi,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, 74.

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complex. Petrarch takes abstract concepts (Love, Chastity, Death, Glory, etc.) and personifies them in order to convey a clearly defined intellectual and moral significance which in turn may or may not reflect spiritual implications. This produces an effect contrary to Dante’s.57

Petrarch’s literary prejudice toward Dante is related to Petrarch’s alternative approach to style and substance. Petrarch’s epistle Fam. 21.15 represents an instance in the history of literary imitation, a glimpse of Petrarch’s anxious regard for Dante as a poet, evident from the irony pervading the text. The epistle documents an assessment of Dante’s poetry, without mentioning Dante’s name (Petrarch did so only once, “contra Dantem”).58 As Petrarch’s highly refined language, suitable for courtly discourse, set the standard across Europe, particularly with sonnets, Dante’s poetry was somewhat eclipsed, except in Florence, where he was venerated as a civic hero. Still, Dante’s Commedia was copied and printed: for example, from 1477 to 1478, it was printed in Venice, Milan, and Naples.59 In 1481, Niccolò della Magna published twelve hundred copies of the Commedia in Florence with Landino’s commentary, the first illustrated printing, and this edition dominated the reading market until 1544, when Vellutello’s commentary appeared.60 Dante’s Commedia was first translated into French in 1409 by Laurent de Premierfait, secretary of the Duc de Berry. During the reign of François I, there were copies of Dante in private library collections at Fontainebleau, Blois, Paris, and elsewhere. In France, writers such as Jean Lemaire de Belges, Marguerite de Navarre, and Symphorien Champier read Dante with interest. The question of which poet was superior, Dante or Petrarch, was debated in literary circles in Italy in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento.61 Similar debates existed among proponents of Plato and Aristotle, and Michelangelo and Raphael in painting. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio formed a Tuscan triad (le tre corone, “the three crowns”) of major writers. Boccaccio admired both Dante and Petrarch; he gave the first lectura Dantis in 1373, and wrote a treatise

57 Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante,” 516. 58 See Cachey in Petrarch and Dante, 5–6. 59 Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” 67. 60 Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” 63. 61 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, book 2, p. 176, note 1. For a treatment of Cinquecento arguments about Dante’s poetry, see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 2, ch. 16 and 17, pp. 819–911. Weinberg notes that while the “quarrel” itself began in 1572 (p. 820), the writings of Bembo, Benivieni, Gelli, et al. were produced earlier in the fifteenth century; the place of philosophy in poetry was a major point of contention (p. 822).

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praising Dante as poet-hero, the Trattatello in laude di Dante (ca. 1351–1355).62 Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (1342, revised ca. 1365), composed in terza rima, is divided into fifty cantos, and contains numerous echoes of Dante’s Commedia. The Latin question troubled assessments of Dante: whether poets using the vernacular could equal the achievements of classical poets such as Vergil. Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) concurred with the early Dante commentator Benvenuto da Imola (ca. 1338–1390) that whereas Petrarch produced greater prose (maior orator), Dante produced greater poetry (maior poeta).63 The Dante biography by Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), Vita di Dante (1430s), contrasted with Boccaccio’s; Bruni’s became the standard version. Lorenzo de’ Medici commented that theorizing on the vernacular was useless; its greatness would have to be proven by excellent examples in volgare illustre fiorentino (illustrious Florentine vernacular).64

62 David Wallace, “Boccaccio, Giovanni,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 101. 63 Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” 45. 64 Salvadori, “Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento,” 52.

5 Scève and Dante: “Incessamment travaillant en moy celle” Délie contains direct references to hell (as Enfer in dizains 77, 11, and 324; Enfers in dizains 3 and 445); purgatory (Purgatoire, dizain 125), and paradise (Paradis, dizains 58, 149, 240, 314, 324, and 409), references to paradise being the most numerous. To attain paradise in union with Délie is the poet-lover’s ultimate vision and goal, but it seems evanescent and chimerical. Of the three domains, purgatory is the transitional mean between two extremes, where suffering coexists with the promise of bliss to come. Purgatory lends itself well to the in-between metaphorical state of the poet-lover in Délie. While allusions to hell, purgatory, and paradise in Délie might not seem to refer overtly to Dante’s Commedia, when they are set in context with other evidence, parallels emerge. Scholars of Scève including Cynthia Skenazi, Gérard Defaux, Lance Donaldson-Evans, and Michael Giordano have developed Christian and spiritual interpretations of Délie. Skenazi prudently comments: “Parler de la pensée chrétienne de Scève ne suppose pas nécessairement que son oeuvre soit théologique et que la Délie soit une allégorie religieuse.”1 She states, “[D]e la Délie au Microcosme, le poète lyonnais fait le récit d’une aventure spirituelle qui s’intègre dans un contexte christocentrique profondément marqué par la lecture de saint Paul.”2 In my reading, spirituality in Délie is not exclusively or deeply Christian, which contributes to its enigmatic quality and syncretism, and imposes limits on Christian readings of Scève’s dizain sequence. The work draws upon currents of hermeticism, mysticism, and Neoplatonism. While biblical intertexts are present, as in many sixteenth-century texts, Skenazi comments, “tout au long de la Délie, le religieux ne cesse de se mêler à l’érotique, de le doubler, de l’envahir. Amour sacré, amour profane . . .”3 In Délie, the sacred-profane duality dissolves: the conception of amour incorporates the erotic, instead of excluding it. The presence of sacred and so-called profane love (sensual passion and desire for union) in Délie undermines a reading that is consistently Christocentric. The love expressed is heterodox from a Christian standpoint, if not a transgression akin to fin’amor. While the importance of Petrarch’s Canzoniere for Délie is evident from its allusions, in terms of spirituality Scève is closer to Dante than to Petrarch. Laura

1 Cynthia Skenazi, Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne, 9. 2 Skenazi, 9. 3 Skenazi, Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne, 10. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-006

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cannot be a means to attain salvation and paradise for Petrarch, as Beatrice is for Dante. Laura is absolutely unattainable for Petrarch, not because she is a goddess or divine figure in paradise, but because Petrarch is not supposed to be obsessed with her. She incarnates the poet’s illicit desire, a gateway to sins of vanity and pride via poetic achievement. Christian guilt arises from his desire for her, although ostensibly no sinful act of consummation has taken place; the guilt is nourished by the poet-persona’s impure state due to original sin. Petrarch’s desire itself is dangerous, as any passion may be for its power to unbalance and drive its subject to the depraved animal level of appetite (in contrast to exalting the noble part of oneself through caritas). Petrarch is supposed to love God with all his might, not Laura. Petrarch explores his guilt further in the Secretum, in the dialogue between Franciscus and Augustinus (representing Augustine). Laura is not incorporated into a vision of Petrarch’s salvation, as Beatrice is transfigured for Dante. In the premodern and early modern eras, the realm of sexual desire and eroticism was often conflated with the “problem” of women by men who promulgated ecclesiastical doctrines. Christian thought concerning women and sexuality was not monolithic, but frequently ranged from ambivalent to hostile. Preachers, abbots, and others exhorted their brethren to avoid the temptations of women and fornication, emphasizing women’s flaws in order to turn the monks away from fulfilling their sexual needs in secret. Beliefs about purity and cleanliness, and avoidance of pollution, accompanied by the sacred-profane polarity, informed Christian ideas about the value of sexual abstinence and virginity. Notwithstanding debates about the soul and the Last Judgment, on earth at least, a woman’s place was legally, morally, and socially inferior to that of man.4 As for the earthly place of women, as Stephen G. Nichols put it, “Marriage and literature had a great deal to do with the cultural status of women in medieval literature. . . Marriage, like literature, is mimetic, a symbolic representation of the political order.”5 Women and marriage were perceived as constant threats to the “holiness of the Christian (male) vessel.”6 Sex even within marriage was for procreation rather than pleasure. Eve as the primordial woman was denounced as the weaker sex for being more susceptible to moral laxity, along with all women after her who succumbed to temptation. The doctrine of the immaculate

4 For New Testament views on women, see Judith L. Kovacs, “Women in the New Testament,” in Morton Smith and R. Joseph Hoffmann eds., What the Bible Really Says (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 213–27. For a survey of ecclesiastical views on women, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, chap. 2, “Theology, Mystical and Occult Writings,” 6–27. 5 Stephen G. Nichols, “An Intellectual Anthropology of Marriage in the Middle Ages,” in The New Medievalism, 70. 6 Nichols, “Intellectual Anthropology,” 79.

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conception and its preoccupation with Mary’s virginity were consistent with wariness of the female body and sexual passion. Passion in excess was perceived as disruptive to stability and social order. It was pointed out that Jesus never married, and Jerome declared that Christ and Mary were both virgins, and consecrated the pattern of virginity for both sexes.7 Ecclesiastical attempts were made to impose celibacy and to forbid marriage among the clergy (flagrantly disregarded by some) from the fourth century onward, notably in 1075 by Gregory VII (Hildebrand), in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, and in 1545 at the Council of Trent.8 Canon law notwithstanding, lust could be so strong that apparently it overwhelmed one’s love for God,9 and thus human passion, even for a brief moment, could dominate over piety and devotion. From this point of view, it would be seen as sacrilege to love another person, a fellow mortal creature, more than God the Creator, and to cherish a human being more than the deity. This has been a fundamental challenge for Christian authorities constructing and maintaining the edifice of institutional religion in light of its own doctrines. Sex, though necessary for reproduction, was considered a threat to the hegemony and stability of the church, and therefore it had to be managed, restricted, and channeled into appropriate contexts. The history of human sexual activity and prostitution make a mockery of such efforts, but the church did succeed in establishing conventions, practices, obstacles, restrictions, and penalties for noncompliance. Chastity and obedience were imposed on women, especially nuns, all the more strictly than on men in the church hierarchy. The danger of sexual passion was often identified with women, not only because they were objects of temptation for men, but also because women, as daughters of Eve, were viewed as weak creatures and susceptible to temptation. Women usually bore responsibility and consequences for men’s desires and for their own. Ascetic repression, rather than validation and acceptance, colored patristic Christian views concerning sex, the body, and women. Secular love poetry evoking complex emotions and desire for beautiful women could subvert repressive beliefs that associated sex with sin. The Augustinian Petrarch seemed unable to resolve this conflict of ideology in his lyric. In Christian theology, union in sacred and divine love was to occur through metaphysical means, rather than through sexual expression of the body, which was defined as a corrupt container for base passions including lust; this view

7 Vivian Green, A New History of Christianity, 10. 8 For a history of church rulings on ecclesiastical celibacy, see Herbert Thurston, “Celibacy of the Clergy,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), vol. 3, 481–88. 9 See Wayland Young, Eros Denied, chap. 17.

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was adapted by the early church from Manichean and Gnostic beliefs about the physical body. The erotic was excluded from the model of union, separated from love, and viewed as a temptation to sin. This was reinforced through Christian faith and buttressed by theology and preaching. For a man with a prostitute, Paul states, “the two shall become one flesh” (1 Cor 6:16; Vulgate: erunt . . . duo in carne una), advocating instead for men to become one with God in spirit, rather than carnally; this passage responds to other biblical passages (e.g., Gen. 2:24). Physical union is denounced as impure, and the appropriate union is only abstract and spiritual, in God. Variations on this view concerning the erotic expression of love are found in Augustine, Tertullian, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, and others.10 Paul recommends celibacy: “It is well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor. 7:1; Vulgate: de quibus autem scripsistis bonum est homini mulierem non tangere). In book 1 of the Confessions, Augustine names Dido three times to denigrate his previous preoccupation with literature and his emotional reponse to Dido’s fate in the Aeneid.11 Then, in book 2, Augustine recounts his youthful erotic adventures, when he indulged impulses to sate his lust (thus he reads of love, then seeks the experience of love, and later renounces it). Clerical corruption satirized in popular literature, including fabliaux, undermined such antipathy to sex; secular texts and cultural practices did not necessarily adhere to doctrine. The irony for the church was that erotic expression emerged through other means: in metaphors for spiritual union with God, produced by mystics (such metaphors for spiritual experiences were not unique to Christian traditions). Nuns were instructed that they were “brides of Christ.” There was biblical precedent for erotic expression in the ecstatic Song of Songs, despite ecclesiastical efforts to allegorize away the erotic content of that poetry, notably by Bernard of Clairvaux (in the wake of patristic interpretative tradition).12 As Laura Kendrick points out, control of the

10 Reay Tannahill notes in Sex in History (Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, rev. ed. 1992) that Paul, Augustine, Tertullian, and Jerome exerted the greatest influence on Christian ideas about sex; these four men had led full sexual lives before being converted to celibacy and subsequently duly expressing revulsion for their past sins (141). 11 Augustine, Confessions 1.13.20–21. It was common knowledge in Dante’s time that Vergil had invented the affair of Dido and Aeneas in his epic poem; Augustine and other patristic writers had noted Dido’s chastity. See Durling and Martinez, eds., Paradiso, note to 8.9, p. 175. 12 Concerning early modern interpretations of the Song of Songs, see Max Engammare, “Qu’il me baise des baisers de sa bouche.” Le Cantique des cantiques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993). Engammare analyzes developments in exegesis, historical perspectives, and the decline of mystical interpretations of the text. Engammare’s eponymous first essay in Lire le Cantique des cantiques à la Renaissance (La Rochelle: Rumeurs des Âges, 1994) examines medieval patristic readings that precede early modern interpretative tensions.

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interpretation of texts is connected with institutional authority and the imposition of a unifying viewpoint, to the detriment of divergent interpretations, which may be treated as heterodoxy or heresy.13 The Canzoniere is Augustinian in its confessional aspect, especially in the first and last poems. Petrarch’s love for Laura is circumscribed within a time past, with reflection on the poet-persona’s evolution, accompanied by renunciation of desire. In De doctrina christiana, Augustine contrasts cupidity or selfish desire (cupiditas) with charity (caritas), misguided lust versus Christian love, which draws the human being closer to God. Charitable love does not admit erotic manifestations, which approach personal passion, attachment, the body, and dangerous obsession. Charitable love is expressed differently from lovepassion and is in a sense impersonal. Marguerite de Navarre portrays a transmutation of passionate personal love into Christian caritas in tale 19 of the Heptaméron. Guittone d’Arezzo writes in canzone XVI of desiring a lady who bestows her favors on him: he evokes the loss of her honor with language of sin and penance concerning the perceived transgression. The poet morally condemns the fulfilment of amorous desire as being detrimental to his lady’s virtue. His repudiation of fin’amor prefigures his conversion experience.14 Troubadours such as Peire Rogier and Peire Cardenal moved between poetic and religious vocations. The apparent inspiration of these writers could shift between amorous and religious contexts, and between the evocation of personal love and that of divine love; such a shift occurs in the Canzoniere. While Scève’s poetic expression incorporates divine and mystical aspects in Délie, Scève does not transfer his intense devotion from Délie to the godhead. In Délie, eroticism is not condemned as sin; it enhances the poet’s love for Délie. It is not repressed or forbidden as such, in contrast to Petrarch’s Canzoniere; suffering is lamented, but not the love itself. Emblem 41 of Délie illustrates a pagan erotic scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6: Jupiter as a swan seducing

13 Kendrick, The Game of Love, 5–7. 14 “[C]he giá fu me, gentil mia donna, noia / vostr’ amorosa gioia, / ver ch’ ora mi serea destruggimento / d’onne crudel tormento, / potendo vo tornare in vostro stato: / ché dirittura vol che no schifare / deggi’ om pena portare, / unde possa mendar ciò ch’ ha peccato” (for the joy of love which you gave me, my noble lady, was a burden compared with the blotting out of remorse that I would experience if I could restore you to your former state of honour: because justice demands that no suffering be shirked to make amends for wrongdoing: canzone XVI, lines 53–60). Cited in Vincent Moleta, The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976), p. 99. See also Le rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, edited by Francesco Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940), canzone XVI “Gentil mia donna, gioi sempre gioiosa,” pp. 35–37.

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Leda, a frequent subject in sixteenth-century art. Petrarch, like Ficino, cannot accept the erotic as a valid part of love, a means to higher union, or a manifestation of the divine. In this, Petrarch follows Augustine, whose writings exerted profound influence on him. Augustine’s model of love conflicts with the medieval courtly model, because one is not supposed to adore a woman to excess, especially in seeking physical intimacy. Devotion is to be directed to God, and lust suppressed or controlled through sublimation. John Freccero interprets Dante’s encounter with Beatrice in Purgatorio as a confessional experience. Unlike Augustine’s confession of the theft of pears in the Confessions, Dante’s confession and redemption center on love, without a symbolic theft or transgression. Freccero writes: Whatever the nature of his guilt, it is represented here in erotic terms, but inscribed within a penitential context—Beatrice was once the occasion of his sin and is now its judge—as if to suggest that Eros is here redeemed rather than condemned. . . Eros [is] now domesticated and transformed into that amalgam of Christian and cosmic love which is distinctively Dantesque. This insistence on the recuperability of his erotic past distinguishes Dante’s confession from virtually all others in the Christian tradition.15

The “confession” for past sin might refer to Dante’s interest in the donna gentile after Beatrice’s death (VN 35–38), which the celestial Beatrice later explains as Dante turning away from the true path (Purg. 30.124–38).16 Here, Dante’s erotic desire is somewhat sublimated, yet traces of the old flame of love remain. Despite his general condemnation of indulgence in erotic desire (defined as lust, luxuria) in Inferno 5, Dante does not renounce Beatrice, as Petrarch does Laura; instead, he transforms the nature of his love for Beatrice, whose virtue emanates from her presence (see quote infra). Beatrice’s reference to tearful repentance, “di pentimento che lagrime spanda” (of such repentance as pours forth tears: Purg. 30.145), does not mean Dante repents of his love for her. Similarly, Scève’s love evolves in his poetry, at times spiritual and expansive; the poet-persona’s love is for Délie and virtue, without shame or repentance. The idea of erotic love as a means to higher union circulated during the Renaissance, perhaps through the visual arts more openly than in written

15 John Freccero, “Allegory and Autobiography,” in Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., p. 167. 16 For a summary of scholarly interpretations of the donna gentile in the Vita nuova and Convivio, see Dino Cervigni, “Donna gentile of the Vita Nuova,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 317–18. Maria Corti and others find that the donna gentile in both works represents philosophy, and that poems about her are allegorical.

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forms.17 The medieval alba genre in Latin and vernacular languages evokes the departing lover at dawn after a night of lovemaking. Regardless of ecclesiastical approbation, some poets chose to articulate erotic sentiments, and such genres flourished. Although Petrarchist language and themes became commonplaces in Renaissance vernacular love poetry, some poets were less reticent about expressing erotic desire than Petrarch had been (for example, Gaspara Stampa, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Louise Labé, Pierre de Ronsard, Johannes Secundus, et al.). Treatments of the erotic might include repression, allegory, sublimation, or celebration. Petrarch apparently could not reconcile his love for Laura with his religious convictions and fear concerning his salvation, and this nourished his dissidio, causing anxiety evident in canzone Rvf 366, a supplication to the Virgin Mary and renunciation of his love for Laura. Perhaps the supplication is ironic; the prayer comes at the end of the cycle, forming one year, and the calendar begins anew. The moral strictures in the Canzoniere began to appear in compositions from ca. 1349–1350, at least two decades after its genesis.18 Stephen Minta summarizes the Canzoniere as “the poet’s solitary attempt to resolve the conflict between ideals and experience which his unreciprocated love for Laura inevitably entailed. Petrarch’s ideal, the standard against which he constantly measured himself, is that of the good Christian life. . . . Petrarch’s love for Laura presented a constant threat to this doctrine.”19 To judge from evidence in the Secretum dialogue and the letter recounting his ascent of Mt. Ventoux (Fam. 4.1), as well as other epistles, it seems that Petrarch truly grappled with these matters. Petrarch envisions a reunion with Laura in paradise in the Triumphus eternitatis, but does not narrate the scene with Dante’s intensity (Purg. 30, see infra). In Délie, the poet’s love is not consistently reciprocated, but erotic love constitutes part of the poet’s love for Délie, without moral ambivalence. This precludes an interpretation that identifies Délie with Mary and limits the relegation of Scevian love to religious allegory for spiritual ascent. Petrarch’s renunciation of Laura in the Canzoniere contrasts with Dante in Purgatorio 30 in the earthly paradise, when Virgil is about to take his leave and Beatrice appears, veiled: per occulta virtù che da lei mosse, d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza. (Purg. 30.38–39)

17 See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958, 1968), especially chaps. 9–10. See also Jean Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods [La Survivance des dieux antiques] (1953). 18 Luca Marcozzi, “Making the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, 54. Marcozzi continues: “At the end of the 1340s . . . [Petrarch] transposed in his lyric poems some of the moral needs of the Secretum and the asceticism of the treatises on religious otium and the solitary life” (57). 19 Stephen Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions, 3.

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(because of hidden power that moved from her, [my spirit] felt the great force of ancient love.)

Dante echoes Vergil in Aeneid 4.23, when Dido tells her sister Anna about her attraction to Aeneas: “Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae” (I feel once more the signs of the old flame). In the sacred space Dante recounts, with the closeness of God and the angels, the moment calls for piety, modesty, and humility. Even so, Dante boldly writes that his response to the presence of Beatrice is that of a resurgence of love, expressed as amor rather than caritate (“charity,” a word used only five times in the Commedia, compared with amor/amore, used more than 140 times, without counting related words such as innamorata and amoroso). Dante’s use of amor here is reinforced by virtù and potenza, all three terms having secular connotations, signifying power and strength, rather than Christian virtue or charity. When Dante encounters Beatrice, she rebukes him as a jealous pagan goddess would. The young girl of nine portrayed initially in the Vita nuova has grown into a courtly domina. This passage epitomizes what makes Dante’s work engaging to readers, and why the Commedia did not belong in a category of pious devotional literature. Dante does not completely purge the erotic, despite the pilgrim having passed through purgatorial flames that purify lust; the erotic returns “per occulta virtù” (by hidden force: Purg. 30.38). When Bembo ascribes occulta virtù to Petrarch’s lyric in Prose della volgar lingua (1525), the concept is transposed from Dante’s scene in the Commedia to Petrarch’s text and reader.20 Scève refers to la passion hiding, “occultant” (D 361.2), and concludes with “sainct object de mon affection” (D 361.10). The poets ascribe intensity to the object of passionate desire corresponding to the desire itself, a secret (occult) force existing through its evocation in poetry. Dante indicates that his love for Beatrice still burns: “col foco ond’io sempr’ ardo” (with the fire that always burns in me: Par. 26.15); the context is also divine love, but the language reflects Dante’s love toward Beatrice. Dante writes: La mente innamorata, che donnea con la mia donna sempre, di ridure ad essa li occhi più che mai ardea, e se Natura o arte fé pasture da pigliare occhi per aver la mente in carne umana o ne le sue pitture, tutte adunate parrebber nïente ver’ lo piacer divin che mi refulse quando mi volsi al suo viso ridente.

20 Hunkeler in Le vif du sens, 60–63, discusses occulta virtù from Bembo’s treatise in relation to Petrarch and Scève, building on William J. Kennedy’s article, “The Unbound Turns of Maurice Scève,” in Creative Imitation (1992).

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E la virtù che lo sguardo m’indulse del bel nido di Leda mi divelse e nel ciel velocissimo m’impulse. (Par. 27.88–99) (My enamored mind, that ever courts my lady, more than ever burned to turn my eyes back to her, and if Nature or art have ever made bait to capture the eyes and so gain the mind in human flesh or paintings of it, all, gathered together, would seem nothing next to the divine beauty that shone on me when I turned to her smiling eyes. And the power her glance instilled in me uprooted me from Leda’s lovely nest and lifted me up to the heaven that is swiftest.)

Dante is still in love with Beatrice, and employs fin’amor and stilnovo motifs in the setting of Paradise: his lady’s eyes and the force of her glance, her radiant beauty, and her presence, blessed by “lo piacer divin” (the divine pleasure). The beauty and virtù inherent in Beatrice’s glance correspond to Délie’s vertu and her glance toward the poet-lover. Leda (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6) appears in emblem 41 of Délie, and evokes seduction by a god. The passage is similar to Scève’s descriptions of Délie as a creature who induces delight and divine admiration, with allusions to nature (for example, D 2). Once suffering is transcended, Beatrice and Délie lead their respective poet-lovers to the good, which implies joy and exaltation. In Purgatorio 30, an intertext occurs with Scève’s haulte vertu of Délie and Dante’s alta virtù, at the crucial moment when Beatrice appears to the pilgrim: Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse l’alta virtù che già m’avea trafitto. (Purg. 30.40–41) (As soon as my sight was struck by that high power that had transfixed me.)

Just as Dante ascribes the attribute of high power and virtue to Beatrice, incorporating the sense of force, corresponding to gran potenza (Purg. 30.39), Scève ascribes haulte vertu to Délie, each lady being analogous to an imperious goddess. Like its Italian cognates, the semiotically rich French word vertu can signify force as well as quality. In the Convivio, Dante offered canzoni about love and virtue, “d’amor come di vertù materiate,” to increase understanding and reduce obscurity, “alcuna oscuritade ombra” (Conv. 1.1.14).21 For Dante, love (amore) and virtue, love as virtue, are closely linked with women and beauty.22

21 Cited in Hunkeler, “Dante à Lyon,” 23. 22 Philippe Delhaye-Giorgio Stabile, “Virtù,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 5, 1055–1056.

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Scève likewise associates these qualities with Délie and his poetic sequence, linking amour and vertu. Scève’s poetic persona marvels in Délie’s presence, “sa mirable merveille” (D 7.6), and his “espritz raviz” (D 7.5). In the cantos of the summit of Purgatory and Paradise where Dante and Beatrice are together, the pilgrim is awed by his experiences. Lino Pertile has noted Dante’s amorous language in Paradiso, which he characterizes as “audaciously erotic.”23 When Dante the pilgrim undergoes examination in Paradise concerning the three theological virtues, with John’s question about where his soul is focused, instead of a pious answer, Dante (who cannot see at that moment) alludes to Beatrice having penetrated him through the eyes, for which his love burns in response: “col foco ond’ io sempr’ ardo” (with the fire that always burns in me: Par. 26.15).24 Dante mentions Love (Amore) reading to him (Par. 26.18). These are courtly and stilnovo topoi apparently integrated here with divine love. The passage recalls Virgil’s explanation of love from Purgatorio 22. 10–12, along with “così accende amore” (thus kindles love: Par. 26.29), and a reformed version of reading about love beyond Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5. While the Commedia imposes an elaborate tripartite structure, which Dante the pilgrim explores in hierarchical stages, Scève rearranges moments from various stages, alluding to hell, purgatory, and paradise, which he employs without schematic hierarchy in Délie. Scève writes: “Doncques espere avec deceue envie / Aux bas Enfers trouver beatitude” (D 3.9–10). These lines recall Dante’s Commedia, folding that long narrative poem up into the polar opposites of compressed verse in line 10 with Enfers and béatitude (whose etymology is shared with the name “Beatrice”). Paradoxically, the poet-lover finds béatitude in the midst of Enfers. This early dizain frames the poetic discourse, and béatitude points to Délie. The terms Enfers and béatitude together constitute a reordering of Dante’s hierarchy: for Scève, Délie is present even in his interior hell, whereas Beatrice resides in Paradise but descends to call Virgil to guide Dante on his journey. Dante mentions “primo amore” (primal love: Inf. 3.6) on the inscription of the gates of Hell, juxtaposing eternal suffering with divine love, like Scève’s “bas Enfers” alongside “béatitude” (coincidentia oppositorum). The word béatitude

23 Pertile writes: “La luce intellettuale che avvolge l’universo al di là dello spazio e del tempo è piena d’amore (Par. XXX 40); amore fa girare attorno a Dio i nove cori angelici . . . mentre la mente del pellegrino è più che mai innamorata di Beatrice. Tutta la terza cantica è pervasa dal linguaggio del desiderio, al punto che persino lo sforzo intellettuale del pellegrino di afferrare una realtà che trascende ogni lingua umana viene ritratto in termini audacemente erotici,” La punta del disio, semantica del desiderio nella Commedia (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005), 235. 24 Singleton understands the question as asking for what objective the soul aims, which concerns primarily the will (Singleton, Paradiso, 2, Commentary, Par. 26, 411). The verb “legge” (Par. 26.18) implies teaching.

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recalls the words spoken to Dante by his spirito animale about Beatrice in his dream vision in the Vita nuova: “Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra” (Now has appeared your beatitude: VN 2.6): beatitudo echoes Beatrice’s name.

Prometheus Scève evokes the mythical figure of Prometheus, who is condemned to suffer infernal, repetitive punishment for transgressing Zeus’s divine will. Prometheus has represented a prophet, a defiant genius, an inventor, a creator, and defender of humanity who brings fire and civilization to human life, and one who reveals secrets and suffers for it. In the Christian era, Prometheus became a figura Christi, suffering on behalf of humanity. Thus the pagan character acquired a moralized Christian aspect and was assimilated into the post-antiquity canon of mythological figures. Just as Scève’s vision in dizain 228 is presented as internal (imaginary) yet encompassing the entire universe, so in dizain 77 the poet alludes to Prometheus to evoke his personal agony, manifested in universal terms.25 The earliest mention of Prometheus the Titan is from Hesiod’s Works and Days; Hesiod (fl. ca. 700 BCE) associated the name Prometheus with forethought, juxtaposed with his brother Epimetheus (afterthought). The extant play Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus and perhaps part of a trilogy, survived in medieval manuscripts; editions were printed in Greek (1518) and Latin (1556). Scève’s interest in Prometheus probably increased with the publication of Jean Olivier’s Latin poem Pandora (1541) by Étienne Dolet in Lyon.26 Scève might have read of Prometheus from Cicero, Lucretius, Ovid, or Propertius, or from Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium. Petrarch mentions Prometheus once in his epic Africa (7.554), though not in the Canzoniere or Triumphi. In Genealogia deorum gentilium 4.44, Boccaccio associates Prometheus with the scholar’s quest for knowledge and its solitary mental torments, and humanists later develop this theme.27 In Boccaccio’s

25 François Rigolot and François Cornilliat have analyzed dizain 77: see Rigolot, Le texte de la Renaissance (1982), 175–76, and Cornilliat, “Dizain LXXVII” in Dix études sur la “Délie” de Maurice Scève (1987), 49–56. 26 Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, lxii-lxiv. 27 Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1, 4.44, 528–545. Boccaccio interprets suffering and torments metaphorically, e.g. in §18 and §21–22. See also Pierre Brunel, ed., Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, and Archetypes, trans. Wendy Allatson, Judith Hayward, and Trista Selous (London: Routledge, 1995), 973–74.

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wake, Ficino writes of Prometheus and mental torments, and this is taken up by Charles de Bovelles.28 Scève’s dizain is as follows: Au Caucasus de mon souffrir lyé Dedans l’Enfer de ma peine éternelle, Ce grand desir de mon bien oblyé, Comme l’Aultour de ma mort immortelle, Ronge l’esprit par une fureur telle, Que consommé d’un si ardent poursuyvre, Espoir le fait, non pour mon bien, revivre: Mais pour au mal renaistre incessamment, Affin qu’en moy ce mien malheureux vivre Prometheus tourmente innocemment. (D 77)

Scève presents himself as symbolically exiled to the Caucasus, a wild, remote place where Prometheus, punished by Zeus, was chained and attacked daily by an eagle that devoured his liver; according to myth, after a long time, Heracles killed the eagle with an arrow. The geographical location Caucasus is paired with the name Prometheus, framing the dizain. But if Prometheus is a figure for Scève the lover, then why does he refer to Prometheus in the third person, when his torment is described in the first person? If we interpret the dizain’s mythological references too literally, the sense breaks down. François Rigolot writes of dizain 77: “La continuité discursive et narrative se trouve mise en échec par des entorses multiples à la grammaticalité: suppression des mots-liens superflus, accentuation des mot-signes indispensables, valorisation de la substantivité du lexique.”29 The infinitives of the verbs souffrir, poursuivre, vivre, and revivre, used as substantives by Scève, destabilize the subject’s identity, rendering the dizain an enigmatic textual abstraction. The adverb incessamment makes sense, whereas the rhyming adverb innocemment makes sense only if Prometheus or Scève is being punished despite not having committed a crime, or if the punishment is inflicted in ignorance of the truth, implying injustice. The poet-lover is compelled to chase Délie (“ardent poursuyvre,” line 6), but finds only exhaustion. For François Cornilliat, Prometheus is the “figure de l’humaine condition amoureuse,”30 experiencing repeatedly a death and rebirth of hope. If Scève identifies himself with Prometheus, then he is divine, and associated with the Pandora myth. Pandora is cited in dizain 2 as an epithet for Délie: “Comme de tous la delectation / Et de moy seul fatale Pandora” (D 2.9–10). However, if Scève’s persona is mortal, then he is comparable to Epimetheus, whom 28 Ficino, “Quaestiones quinque de mente” (written in 1476–1477), in Epistolarum liber II; Charles de Bovelles, Liber de Sapiente (1509). 29 F. Rigolot, Le texte de la Renaissance, 176. 30 François Cornilliat, “Dizain LXXVII“, in Dix études, 52.

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Prometheus warned in vain about Pandora. Pandora, whose name in Greek means “all-gifted,” is given to Epimetheus, with disastrous consequences for humanity. Adorned with attributes and charms, she is presented in Greek myth as the source of man’s woes. This is apt for the poet’s amatory lament. In the Convivio (4.15.8), Dante mentions Prometheus as creating man from earth and water in the likeness of the gods; Dante alludes to the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although the name Prometheus is not found in Dante’s Commedia or Vita nuova, his terrible fate is consonant with the idea of Hell, where souls are condemned to be punished for eternity. The souls possess the shadow of a physical body only for that purpose: extreme and prolonged physical torments are possible only if the body recovers repeatedly, just as the liver of Prometheus grows back each night for the savage eagle’s consumption the next day. In that vein, Scève mentions in dizain 77 “mort immortelle” and “peine éternelle,” which form the rhyme of lines 2 and 4. The crime is loving and desiring, essentially without fulfilment, and the punishment is the same. The “Aultour” is the bird preying on the poet, tormenting his “esprit” rather than the liver. This bird represents his own desire, which afflicts him repeatedly with quasi-mortal intensity, yet he does not die, so that the suffering repeats itself, hence his “mort immortelle.” Instead of his body, an organ such as the heart or liver, it is Scève’s spirit or vitality that is consumed: “Ce grand désir [. . .] ronge l’esprit par une fureur telle” (D 77.3–5). Since esprit is immaterial, it cannot be consumed like a bodily organ, yet Scève develops an analogy with the consumption of flesh. The devouring of flesh recalls the heart immolation in dizain 3, and the Dantean heart consumed by Beatrice in the Vita nuova. His love is nourished by hope, which in turn causes more suffering (lines 7–8), so that he is between life and death, and no redemption is envisaged. Hope causes his “esprit” to restore itself like Prometheus’s liver, and the cycle begins anew. The repetition of an experience, and another version of “mort immortelle,” is “les mortz, qu’en moi tu renovelles” from the dedicatory huitain of Délie (line 3).31 Cornilliat comments, “Il n’est donc pas étonnant que [ce] dizain . . . fasse véritablement un sort à l’histoire de Prométhée, en dépit de l’attraction réciproque, déjà codée en pétrarquisme, entre l’histoire du Titan et le motif des morts incessantes.”32 Cornilliat follows Parturier’s note mentioning the Petrarchist poet Chariteo as an inspiration for dizain 77. Chariteo conflates the medieval motif of the lover’s heart being consumed with the Promethean myth of the liver devoured nightly by the eagle:

31 Cornilliat writes of D 77: “une évidente illustration des ‘mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles,” François Cornilliat, “Dizain LXXVII”, in Dix études, 51. 32 François Cornilliat, “Dizain LXXVII”, in Dix études, 52.

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Mi mena Amor, che si nutrisce e pasce Del mio cor, che rinasce Et cresce ogni hora assai più che non manca Devorato di quel bramoso augello . . .33 (Love leads me, which is nourished and feeds on my heart, [a heart] that is renewed and grows so much more every hour that it does not fail to be devoured by that covetous bird of prey . . .)

It is the poet-lover’s heart that is repeatedly devoured by the bird, “augello”; however, Chariteo does not specify that it is a bird of prey, but only that the bird is “bramoso,” desirous or covetous. Instead of being an eagle (aquila) sent by Zeus for punishment, the bird apparently serves Amor. While dizain 77 might be inspired in part by Chariteo’s poem as Parturier claims, Prometheus is not named in the Canzoniere or Triumphi, which calls into question the notion that Prometheus imagery should be considered Petrarchan. The lover’s internal mental torment resembles that of Boccaccio’s Promethean figure in Genealogia deorum gentilium 4.44 (subsequently developed by Ficino and other humanists): for Scève it finds resolution when “vexation” leads to “entendement” (D 94.10). The other reference in Délie to the Caucasus occurs in dizain 149: Et Helicon, ensemble et Parnasus, Hault Paradis des poetiques Muses, Se demettront en ce bas Caucasus: Où de Venus les troys fainctes Meduses Par le naïf de tes graces infuses Confesseront (toutefoys sans contraincte) La Deité en ton esprit empraincte Thresor des Cieulx, qui s’en vont devestuz Pour illustrer Nature à vice astraincte, Ore embellie en tes rares vertus.

Helicon and Parnassus, evoked together as the ideal places for poetry, where the Muses reside, are contrasted with the inhospitable Caucasus. According to McFarlane, the three fainctes Meduses are in fact the three Graces (“fainctes” because they use their transformative power for good, rather than turning mortals to stone). The three are attendants of Venus who will descend to the Caucasus.34 This passage parallels dizain 182: “Et Graces sont de la Vertu puissance, / Nous transformant plus, que mille Meduses” (lines 3–4). The “bas Caucasus” is contrasted

33 Délie, éd. Parturier, D 77, note 2, from Chariteo, Percopo edition, II, 28, canzone 2. 34 McFarlane notes that in “se demettront” (line 3), according to the Cotgrave dictionary, the verb “se démettre” has the nuance of humiliation.

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with “Hault Paradis.” The Caucasus could mean the ordinary, corrupt world, “bas” in comparison with Paradis and les Cieulx. But the adjective “bas” is deliberate, for the Caucasus in classical tradition referred to a mountainous region. Helicon and Parnassus are mountains as well. The inversion of a mountain is a valley or pit. The mountain of Purgatory in the Commedia is the spatial inversion of Hell, a cone underground with Lucifer at the bottom, and Paradise is beyond the summit of Purgatory. The Graces do not properly belong in a forsaken place, but they may descend there, the way other exalted creatures do. The popular medieval motif of the harrowing of hell recounted Christ descending into the underworld: Dante mentions it in Inferno 4. In Inferno 2, Beatrice descends to call Virgil to serve as guide to Dante the pilgrim, as she herself recounts in Purgatorio 30.139–41. The divine Beatrice’s purview thus includes the trinity of subterranean, earthly, and celestial domains. By the same token, Délie dominates with the triple epithet of Hecate-Diane-Lune (D 22), corresponding to the underworld (realm of the dead), earth, and paradise. Beatrice and Délie, capable of accessing all three realms, possess supernatural attributes. Dante has Virgil explain to the pilgrim that Hecate in Hell is “la donna che qui regge” (the lady who reigns here: Inf. 10.80). Scève’s poetic collection contains echoes of all three canticles of Dante’s Commedia in non-narrative form. The poet-lover in Délie drifts from one state to another without finding stability: the love experience evokes by turns hell, purgatory, and paradise, the poet-lover being at the mercy of Délie and his turmoil. This instability contributes to the paradoxical and ephemeral qualities of his dizain sequence. We recall the lines of Scève cited above, “Doncques espere avec deceue envie / Aux bas Enfers trouver beatitude” (D 3.9–10). The verb espérer, while consistent with envie, is juxtaposed with déçue (from the verb décevoir), whose effect creates a contradictory motion with simultaneous uplift and descent, toward heaven and hell. These movements are reinforced in the closing line of dizain 3, which juxtaposes bas Enfers with béatitude. The poetlover finds contentment or ecstasy in unexpected places, the hell of lovesuffering. Troubadours evoked the poetic topos of sweet suffering in love as well. The terms Enfers and béatitude bear religious connotations, the latter deriving from ecclesiastical Latin beatitudo. Yet the context for Scève’s situation with Délie is not Christian, but rather courtly love, where the trope of lovesuffering means the lover experiences primal emotions including joy, anger, and sadness. Religious references in Délie tend to function as metaphors for illustration; some dizains could be read as blasphemous, extolling idolatry. In dizain 3, charmed by the lady’s “doux venin” (a Petrarchan antithesis, after dolce veneno in Rvf 152), the poet-lover develops his long cycle addressed to Délie, “idolatrer en ta divine image” (D 3.2). For his part, Petrarch, careful with his language,

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avoids mentioning “inferno” except once in the Triumphus cupidinis, in a pagan mythological reference to Orpheus following Eurydice into the underworld. Although Scève’s lyric sequence does not possess a narrative structure, still a motif emerges in Délie of the poet on a journey, wandering, in a state between life and death. Dante’s journey opens with a dark scene involving a forest, the selva oscura, in which the path was lost: “la diritta via era smarrita” (the straight way was lost: Inf. 1.3). Dante writes, “la verace via abbandonai” (I abandoned the true path: Inf. 1.12); thus, the pilgrim wandered. The first canticle of Dante’s Commedia invokes death and suffering, terrifying even to narrate: “Tant è amara che poco è più morte” (It is so bitter that death is little more so: Inf. 1.7). This is followed by the gradual ascent to eventual exaltation in the two subsequent canticles, but in Inferno, Dante the pilgrim is frequently overwhelmed by his experiences, and approaches death himself while surrounded by death. The shades in Hell are the living dead: they can move and speak with Dante, a living soul passing through the place, whereas they are trapped shadows outside worldly time. Scève alludes to death and wandering in the underworld. He discusses his tomb (D 447) and Délie’s (D 175), and alludes to a monument in D 449. Death and hell are the moon’s purview: Comme Hecaté tu me feras errer Et vif, et mort cent ans parmy les Umbres: Come Diane au Ciel me resserrer, D’où descendis en ces mortelz encombres: Comme regnante aux infernalles umbres Amoindriras, ou accroistras mes peines. Mais come Lune infuse dans mes veines Celle tu fus, es, et seras DELIE, Qu’Amour a joinct à mes pensées vaines Si fort, que mort jamais ne l’en deslie. (D 22)

Délie apparently banishes the poet-lover to wander in the underworld among the shades, then drawing him to heaven to be with her, in accordance with the moon’s phases. Diana is the full moon, whereas chthonian Hecate represents the new moon in darkness, with lethal, infernal connotations. She determines whether he experiences joy or agony, like a pagan deity. Despite physical, spatial separation, she is within him, and their union transcends death, a condition reiterated in the concluding dizain. In Dante’s Inferno, time is determined by the phases of the moon. The pilgrim Dante wandered among the shades, figuratively dead yet not dead, but only visiting. Scève elsewhere evokes the phoenix (e.g., D 48.9–10 and emblem 11, Figure 1), the poet-lover being reborn and transformed. While Scève’s infernal experience is intense, like Dante’s, it does not imply eternal damnation, but precedes renewal.

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Petrarch alludes to the phoenix (fenice) several times.35 Dante refers to the phoenix in Inferno 24.107. Scève and Dante develop motifs of shadow and shades to represent the dead. In addition to dizain 22 cited supra (lines 2 and 5), Scève writes, “Tu es le Corps, Dame, et je suis ton umbre” (D 376.1), implying that the poet adheres inextricably to his beloved, like a shadow. Délie is the substantive body, initiating movement “par povoir de [s]a haulte excellence” (376.5); the poet follows her closely in silence, as if part of her. Scève refers to a shade of the dead (“Umbre,” line 3) under Hecate’s purview. The poet writes of the lover’s body burned to ashes at the sight of Délie’s divine aspect: “sembler corps, ou umbre de sa vie” (D 13.10). Dante uses ombra to signify shadow as well as a shade in the afterlife, and has Statius explain to the pilgrim how the body’s form makes an impression in air after the soul leaves the body, as flame imitates fire (Purg. 25.85–108). Shadow (ombra) is a major theme in Dante’s petrosa canzone “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra” (To the short day and its great arc of shadow), with its interplay of shadow, light, and desire. In the opening canto of Paradiso, Dante writes in the invocation to Apollo: “O divina virtù, se mi ti presti / tanto che l’ombra del beato regno / segnata nel mio capo io manifesti“ (O divine power, if you lend so much of yourself to me that I may make manifest the shadow of the blessed kingdom that is stamped within my head: Par. 1.22–24). The ombra is his poetry recounting his extraordinary experiences. Petrarch uses ombra frequently in the Canzoniere, but without the same intensity of meaning and imagery. Just as the way is hazardous for Dante on his visionary journey, Scève likewise mentions the danger of his love journey’s path: “Car sa vertu par voye perilleuse / Me penetrant l’Ame jusqu’au mylieu” (D 436). The voye perilleuse is reminiscent of the mountain of Purgatory, whose summit for its climbers is virtue. For Dante, the mountain of Purgatory is a solitary island surrounded by water, accessible only by boat. The hazardous journey is both interior and exterior (that is, worldly or otherworldly travel), undertaken by a “pilgrim.” A pèlerin might be any pilgrim visiting a holy shrine such as Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela, Rome, or the Holy Land; Christian pilgrims sought medical cures or spiritual redemption, salvation for body and soul. The etymon was the Latin peregrinus, meaning “a stranger in a foreign land” (apt for Dante in exile, and for a spiritual quest for God). Scève writes, “Le Pelerin, son voyage accomply, / Retourne en paix, et vers sa maison tire” (D 396. 3–4). Scève indicates that rest eludes him, in contrast to the workman or pilgrim who finally heads home. He writes: “Et moy suant à ma fin grandement, / Ne puis ne paix, ne repos d’elle avoir” (D 396.9–10). Scève’s journey unfolds without a

35 Rvf 135.15, 185.1, 210.4, 321.1, and 323.49.

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guide, unless we consider that the moon, Délie, or her vertu guides him. Nature is guided in creating Délie: “Par les vertus de sa vertu guidées” (D 2.3). Toward the end of the Vita nuova, in chapter 41, Dante writes of the pilgrim and spirito peregrino as one whom Love draws upward: in contemplating Beatrice’s excellence, Dante is exalted beyond his own intellect.36 In a sonnet of the Vita nuova that seems to prefigure the Commedia, he writes: vede una donna, che riceve onore, e luce sì, che per lo suo splendore lo peregrino spirito la mira. (VN 41.6–8) (he sees a lady, who receives honor, and so shines that, because of her splendor, the pilgrim spirit gazes upon her.)

Scève too is a sort of peregrino spirito who ascends to contemplate the lunar goddess he loves: “Et me pers tout en son divine image” (D 397.10), and “Mon ame en Terre (un temps fut) esprouva / Des plus haultz Cieulx celle beatitude” (D 305.1–2). This corresponds to a Dantean ascent and the soul’s yearning for the divine, which here also means yearning for the beloved. Near the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, Beatrice descends into Limbo to call upon Virgil to guide Dante in his journey: Io ero tra color che son sospesi, E donna mi chiamò beata e bella, tal che di comandare io la richiesi. (Inf. 2.52–54) (I was among those souls who are suspended; a lady called to me, so blessed, so lovely that I implored to serve at her command.)

Beatrice tells Virgil that she is motivated by love: “amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (Love prompted me, that Love which makes me speak: Inf. 2.72). And Virgil answers Beatrice not by her name, but by the epithet “Donna di virtù” (Lady of Virtue: Inf. 2.76). The encounter between Dante’s Virgil and Beatrice is inscribed within courtly love, despite Virgil’s classical origin, anachronistic in this context: the Roman poet becomes the lady’s vassal, with emphasis on the lady’s beauty and virtue; the lady requests a task of this man in her service, and cosmic love motivates Virgil, Dante, and the lady. Beatrice is the “donna di virtù” for Dante, just as Délie is for Scève. Scève serves his lady at Love’s command: “Je preferoys à

36 Dante evokes pilgrimage as a journey involving reflection, in the sonnet “Deh peregrini che pensosi andate” (VN 40). The itinerarium mentis recalls Bonaventure’s journey of the mind to God.

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tous Dieux ma Maistresse, / Ainsi qu’Amour le m’avoit commandé” (D 16.1–2). The underlying force of love implies that Dante the pilgrim’s allegorical journey, which constitutes the entire Commedia, is motivated and guided by cosmic Amor, as the final line of Paradiso 33 indicates: “l’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (the Love that moves the sun and the other stars: Par. 33.145). This celestial love also moved Dante’s own “disio” (desire: Par. 33.143). This cosmic love presides over the special bond between Beatrice and Dante. Like a lodestar for the pilgrim-lover, Beatrice leads Dante “di bene in meglio” (from good to better: Par. 10.38).

Inferno 5 The topos of the lover in hell emphasizes the poet-persona’s suffering, or the sad plight of lovers who defy social or moral conventions. The episode of Paolo and Francesca from Inferno 5 has attracted copious commentary.37 Inferno 5 contains a moral condemnation of the chivalric romance that inspires the adultery of Paolo and Francesca, adultery for which they are condemned to whirl about in the eternal storm of the lustful. Dante the poet is preoccupied with courtly love in Inferno 5; as a Christian, he condemns its adulterous, subversive nature, relegating the characters to Hell. The intrigue of the lovers’ story draws on the question of their innocence or guilt. Dante’s ambiguity stems in part from mild condemnation, since the lovers are located in a shallow circle, the second of nine, just below Limbo where the illustrious pagans reside, who do not suffer severe torments as do shades in lower circles. In Dante’s system, luxuria (It. lussuria), lust, was the least grave of the capital sins,38 and the first level of personal and individual sin below pagans in Limbo. Dante composed poetry under the rubric of courtly love, both in the Vita nuova and in his Rime. Dante’s ambiguity also stems from the question of responsibility: with Francesca, or Love, or tales of seduction read in romanzi. Parallels emerge with Scève’s poetry in several ways: the emphasis on memory and longing, the irresistible nature of desire, the recurrent theme of hardness (dur, duro) in love and poetic interpretation, the problem of adultery, and the conflict between passion and reason. The lover’s suffering in Délie implies a private, interior, nonhierarchical hell. Through suffering comes purification, as in dizain 434, and vexation gives way to entendement (D 94), so the suffering is not eternal or

37 I have relied mainly on the editions of Chiavacci Leonardi (Mondadori), Durling and Martinez (Oxford), and Singleton (Princeton) for key passages of the Commedia. 38 See Virginia Jewiss, “Lustful,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 577–78.

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unchanging. Scève’s persona is subjected to involuntary ascesis on the path of love, and elsewhere in Délie we find jouir, jouyssance, and plaisir. Hell is not a final condemnation for the poet-lover, nor his only experience in loving Délie. In Inferno 5, when Dante the pilgrim sees the shades of Paolo and Francesca in the whirlwind, Virgil instructs him to call to them in the name of love, which will compel them to speak. Even in Hell there is love, if only a memory. Love manifests through divine justice as inscribed on the gates of Hell, “primo amore” (primal love: Inf. 3.6). And “primo amore” occurs near the conclusion of Paradiso (32.142) as the vision of light that Dante is compelled to contemplate. Divine love might seem incongruent with Hell, in which people are tormented throughout eternity without hope of redemption, whereas Purgatory involves progression and passage. It infuses the place with absolute moral finality. Still, Dante’s ambiguity overshadows Inferno 5. Dante calls to the couple as a kindred soul, and his call is so moving, “sì forte fu l’affettüoso grido” (so compelling was my deepfelt cry: Inf. 5.87), that they come to him. It is Francesca who tells their story; Paolo only weeps. Dante has Francesca’s shade echo the line from Guinizzelli’s canzone cited supra, “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (To the noble heart love always repairs), particularly “Foco d’amor in gentil cor s’aprende” (love’s fire catches in the noble heart: line 11). Francesca employs a triple anaphora of Amor–Amor–Amor (lines 100, 103, and 106) to begin each terzina. She begins, “Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende” (Love, which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart: Inf. 5.100). Dante corrects this line in Purgatorio 22 with the addition of virtue through Virgil’s parallel statement: “Amore, / acceso di virtù sempre altro accese / pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore” (Love that is kindled by virtue, will, in another, find reply, as long as that love’s flame appears without: Purg. 22.10–12). Thus, virtue becomes an essential component to love, as it is for Scève in Délie. Francesca alludes to the implicit rules of courtly love, as outlined in the dialogues of Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love), among them the obligation that one who is loved must respond to the lover’s appeals (similar to Ficino’s principle in De amore), and that no one can resist the power of love. Francesca says to Dante the pilgrim, “Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” (no one is released from loving: Inf. 5.103). She denies responsibility for her actions. The courtly code confronts Christian morality, and the dominant system condemns the adulterous lovers inspired by courtly love from the book they read together. Dante presents the situation as a conflict between passion and the will. Love, as lust, causes the couple to act as they did, to succumb to their desire, instead of restraining themselves. Dante implies that indulgence in lust, the logical endpoint in the courtly dynamic, is its damning feature. That surrender disrupts the established social and moral order. At the canto’s conclusion, Dante

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the pilgrim faints after Francesca relates her story, which demonstrates the episode’s significance for him, and the gap between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. The pilgrim’s loss of reason is analogous to the condemned couple’s moment of surrender to their desire. In Délie as Other: Toward A Poetics of Desire in Scève’s ‘Délie’ (1994), Nancy Frelick presents a Lacanian and poststructural reading, alluding to Dante’s Commedia, including the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5.39 She cites the episode to remark on the irony inherent in Scève’s search for béatitude in hell (D 3.10). Frelick comments: “The reference to Hell in the last line [of D 3] serves as a reminder that the creation of a cult based on earthly love can lead not only to perpetual torment but to eternal damnation.”40 This is the message of Inferno 5 from a Christian perspective, and it is incompatible with the code of courtly love. The Lyonnais poet does not conclude his poetic sequence or articulation of love for Délie with eternal damnation or its threat. The poet-lover’s suffering is not a moral crisis; he is aux enfers not because of a sinful transgression, but because of persistent, unrequited passion, and being apart from his beloved. Teodolinda Barolini has pointed out that the diction in Inferno 5 is an inverse reflection of Inferno 2: thus talento in Inferno 2.81 refers to Beatrice’s desire to save the pilgrim, whereas in Inferno 5, talento means the lovers’ desire.41 She notes that talento is the final word in Cavalcanti’s canzone “Donna me prega.” In Inferno 2, disio signifies Beatrice’s desire to return to heaven (Inf. 2.71), and the pilgrim’s desire to advance on his journey (2.136), whereas in Inferno 5, disio occurs four times and means physical passion; likewise anima (Inf. 2.58) becomes animal[e] (Inf. 5.88) when Beatrice and Francesca respectively address Dante the pilgrim. During the ascent from Hell to Paradise, courtly love is not abolished, but is reformed and purified. Love-desire is transfigured, but not eliminated from the divine realm. Dante echoes Vergil’s line from Aeneid 6 in his development of the circle of the lustful, as when he writes, “ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille” ([shades] departed from our life because of love: Inf. 5.69). Courtly love is implicated, and Dante declines to endorse lovers acting upon their passions. In the Aeneid, Vergil writes of love’s hardness: “quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit” (those whom harsh love destroyed with cruel death: Aen. 6.442).42 In a pagan context, where there is no salvation or divine forgiveness, this is harsh indeed for the lovers, who may be viewed as tragic figures. In Dante’s Commedia, the lovers’ condemnation is situated in a Christian framework. The moral transgression of 39 Frelick, Délie as Other, 29. 40 Frelick, Délie as Other, 29. 41 Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets, 10–11. 42 Durling and Martinez, eds., Inferno, 5, note to line 69.

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lust is punished through banishment to Hell, or is purified in Purgatory. Longing and desire must be sublimated, directed toward a suitable object, and manifested in an acceptable way. Dante the pilgrim completes this quest, and the poet renders divine the object of his love, Beatrice. Vergil’s passage from Aeneid 6, which employs the adjective durus, indicates the topos of harsh love. This attribute of harshness was used by Scève in the introductory huitain, with “durs Epygrammes.” Dante used it in several contexts: for the unyielding lady of the rime petrose, and for the corresponding harshness that Dante announces for his own verses. Figurative harshness can signify the tough exterior that must be penetrated in order to reach the treasure within, like Rabelais’s substantificque moëlle at the heart of the dog’s bone, in the prologue to Gargantua—whether the treasure is love or exalted understanding. Dante and Scève produce poetic meaning on the true nature of love, which the respective poet-lovers seek and discern along the way. In the Inferno, Dante uses the verb durare (to endure) in the inscription on the gate at the entrance to Hell: “e io etterno duro” (I endure eternally: Inf. 3.8). The verb duro occurs after amore: “Fecemi la divina podestate, / La somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore” (My maker was divine authority, the highest wisdom, and the primal love: Inf. 3.5–6). The three principles refer to the Trinity; juxtaposition of love and eternal punishment, perhaps strange for readers, sets the tone for the situation of the lovers in Inferno 5. It is a harsh love indeed that inflicts eternal punishment without respite, and a harsh wisdom that supports it. The primo amore is not the same kind of love as the yearning of tragic lovers. The lovers in the circle of the lustful turned away from the primo amore, distorted it, and found themselves in Hell without hope of redemption. Suffering and sorrow, “l’etterno dolore” (eternal sorrow: Inf. 3.2), is on the inscription of the gate of Hell. One could interpret the passage as signifying that love, death, and suffering endure in poetry. The Dantean text at the entrance functions as an initiation at a threshold of Hell proper (they have not yet entered the city of Dis). Dante uses the word “duro” again when he asks for his guide Virgil’s help in understanding the inscription on the gate: “Maestro, il senso lor m’ è duro” (Master, their sense is hard for me: Inf. 3.12). This is analogous to the biblical verse concerning the words of Jesus, “durus est hic sermo” (this is a hard saying: John 6:61). According to John Freccero,43 Dante creates a pun in this line with the word senso, which conflates the meaning and the letter of the text itself on the gate. Dante describes the gate as having a “colore oscuro,” oscuro reinforcing through the physical attribute the

43 See Freccero, “Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, esp. 99.

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notion of “duro” as being impenetrable in meaning. Dante the pilgrim needs Virgil’s guidance to penetrate the hardness of the inscription. Time in Hell seems suspended, constituting a relentless, grim eternity witnessed in passing by Dante the pilgrim. In Inferno, time is ruled by the moon’s phases, as it is ruled by Hecate. Scève the poet-lover’s internal hell of suffering in the absence of Délie, according to Jean Céard, represents “une désolante éternité” and “un cercle sans fin.”44 These motifs recall the Dantesque circles of Inferno, augmented by the poet-lover’s experience of exile, emptiness, doubt, and endless waiting. Scève’s awareness of time’s passing is inscribed in memory, compounded by the waxing and waning of the lunar cycle (Délie), by the light and darkness of each day and restless night, and by the renewal of his peine. The pattern is also expressed verbally in the devise “souffrir non souffrir” and in les mortz of the huitain. Scève emphasizes the destructive passage of time: “O ans, ô moys, sepmaines, jours, et heures, / O intervalle, ô minute, ô moment, / Qui consumez les durtez . . .” (D 114.1–3), giving rise to “ce mien doulx tourment” (v. 5). For Yvonne Bellenger, Scève shows time in movement, linked with light.45 Cathy Yandell has noted Scève’s preoccupation with the future and immortality, each proving to be elusive quarry, while the poet-lover “languishes in the present.”46 Concerning distinctions in the articulation of time by early modern French male and female writers, Yandell notes that unlike Scève, Pernette du Guillet in her poetry avoids topics of immortality, anxiety about the passage of time, and the future; instead, Pernette emphasizes a continuing present. As Georges Poulet has observed, Scève dreams of a time that would encompass virtually all times, especially times to come.47 One way for Scève to combat temporality is via poetic fame, in a nod to Petrarchan poetic ambition; in dizain 240, Scève reverses the Petrarchan hierarchy of time conquering fame in the Triumphus temporis. Memory preserves the poet’s peine, as well as joy and great poetry. For Dante, the pain of past experience and errors is washed away in Lethe in Purgatory (Purg. 33). While Scève’s poet-persona longs for oblivion (“je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives,” D 118.10) to escape love-suffering, he ultimately rejects it, alluding to Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from “des Enfers de l’eternel obly” (D 445.10). He writes of “Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée” (D 143.1), even if memory deludes him. Resolution is

44 Jean Céard, “Le temps et la mémoire dans Délie,” in Europe, no. 691–92 (1986), 104–16 (citations on 104–5). 45 Yvonne Bellenger, “Le temps et les jours dans la Délie,” in A Scève Celebration: Délie 1544–1994, 183. 46 Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 108. 47 Yandell, Carpe corpus, 108 and note 62.

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possible through focus on the beloved, if the poet-lover is compelled to “m’oblier moymesmes / Pour mieulx povoir d’autruy me souvenir” (D 289.9–10); shades of Occitan joi and mezura animate this dizain. Scève denounces “mortel Letharge” (D 449.10) for the sake of commemoration of his love. As Michael Giordano (among others) has noted, Scève blends secular and sacred meaning in his treatments of time, death, and renewal, while emphasizing the natural world.48 This is illustrated in emblem 27, whose serpent devours its own tail (Figure 5), a temporal cycle of death and rebirth.

Figure 5: Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 27, La vipere qui se tue (“Pour te donner vie je me donne mort”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

In Délie, Scève frequently plays with imagery of light and shadows, associated with reason and passion, hope and despair. When the light of understanding cannot penetrate thought, it remains obscure and opaque: “Et ma pensée offusquer en tenebres” (D 200.10). Just as Scève the lover struggles with shadows and obscurity, the reader of Délie must penetrate the obscure style of the poet’s 48 Michael Giordano, The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric, 27–29.

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dizains to find the hidden meaning. Acknowledging Arnaut Daniel and his trobar clus style, Dante also expects the reader to exert an effort to comprehend the meaning of his poetry, due to the lofty nature of his message. Petrarch’s dolce style, while rich and elegant (trobar ric), does not present a barrier of obscurity (trobar clus) challenging the reader. In his essay on Inferno 5, Renato Poggioli notes that the name Francesca means “French.”49 Francesca is an avid reader of medieval French romances, including the Arthurian narrative of Lancelot and Guinevere. She is the dominant member of the couple, the one who speaks to Dante; Paolo only weeps. Poggioli writes, “Dante’s scorn is not directed toward Paolo as a separate person, but toward what he stands for; and as such it involves all men who, like him, are the slaves, rather than the masters, of love.”50 The broader society usually subordinated women to men, and courtly love’s elevation of the lady reverses that hierarchy; Dante’s handling of the Paolo and Francesca episode contains a response to the courtly ideal of the lady ruling over her lover: trouble ensues if love is misdirected. Beatrice later commands Dante, but she is not lost or deluded like Francesca. Love is conceived as subordination and service, and exemplified by Lancelot, Tristan, the lover’s discourse in the Roman de la rose, and troubadour lyric. Francesca explains, “Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse” (a Gallehault indeed, that book and he who wrote it, too: Inf. 5.137).51 By Dante’s time, “Galeotto” meant a go-between for lovers, one complicit in facilitating sexual sin. Francesca and Paolo, having been murdered by Francesca’s husband, Paolo’s brother Giovanni Malatesta (called Gianciotto, meaning crippled), are buffeted by the hurricane in the second circle of Hell along with other sinners of their kind. Francesca tells Dante that love led them to union in death: “Amor condusse noi ad una morte” (Love led us on to one death: Inf. 5.106). Amor in this line forms part of Francesca’s triple anaphora and appeal to love. The lovers are united in death, but derive no joy from it. Dante links love and death, but without ecstasy or blissful eternal union. Instead there is only shared punishment for the fleeting, stolen moment of illicit pleasure. Paolo and Francesca

49 Renato Poggioli, “Paolo and Francesca,” in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero, 69–77. Reprinted from “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno,” PMLA 72, no. 3 (June 1957): 313–58. 50 Poggioli, “Paolo and Francesca,” 72. 51 Boccaccio likewise calls his Decameron a Gallehault in this context; the opening reads: “Comincia il libro chiamato Decameron, cognominato prencipe Galeotto”; see Decameron Web, with Italian text based on Vittore Branca’s Einaudi edition (1992), www.brown.edu/ Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShowText.php.

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do not experience eternally the desire that contributed to their plight. They do not lust forever without fulfilment, which could represent another sort of punishment, akin to that of Tantalus with his endless hunger and thirst; perhaps Dante rejected this because one can take pleasure in lust. Dante presents Paolo and Francesca as having taken their forbidden pleasure in that moment while reading the Lancelot romance, acting on the impulse brought about by a dangerous fiction. Here, that desire and pleasure are finished forever; Paolo and Francesca long only for peace and rest, which are denied them. The endless storm is an example of Dante’s contrapasso,52 in which the punishment suits the sin committed: the storm corresponds to the passion that overwhelmed the lovers, in an example of analogous retribution. Francesca, wistful for that unattainable peace, says to Dante the pilgrim: “se fosse amico il re de l’universo, / noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace” (if He who rules the universe were friend to us, then we should pray to Him to give you peace: Inf. 5.91–92). Despite the harrowing nature of Hell in which Christ triumphs over Satan and death and brings certain souls up to heaven (cf. Inf. 4.52–63), there is no discernible hope for Francesca, despite her human appeal as a tragic character. Courtly love convention exalts the woman, and by extension her lover, the poet who praises her in troubadour lyric, through renown and through improvement of his character (since love exerts a positive, ennobling effect). However, in Inferno 5, Dante implies that Francesca brought about her downfall and Paolo’s by her adulterous temptation, incited by reading courtly romance. Desire compels Francesca, and she sins; Dante condemns human weakness, which results in the triumph of desire over the will. The moral condemnation is clearly stated: “dannati i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento” (they are damned because they sinned within the flesh, / subjecting reason to the rule of lust: Inf. 5.38–39). For Dante, the issue is the surrender, which must be resisted. The punishment of the storm itself is not directly sexual, but it represents the passions, chaotic forces beyond control. The lovers are united in their fate, but it is hardly the eternal union lovers crave. Here, love leads not to life but to death; not to salvation, but to damnation. This dynamic corresponds to Petrarch’s dissidio concerning Laura. The texts of the Arthurian romance tradition and courtly love are implicated in Dante’s condemnation, emphasizing the problem of reading such texts. Dante the pilgrim is seduced momentarily in Purgatory by a siren, the “femmina balba” (Purg. 19.7) whose stench awakens the pilgrim when her true

52 From Inf. 28.142. See Teodolinda Barolini, “Hell,” in Dante Encyclopedia, 476.

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nature as an antica strega (ancient witch) is revealed by Virgil, at the request of her opposite, “quella onesta” (presumably Beatrice), whereupon the spell is broken. The siren symbolizes the three vices of avarice, gluttony, and lust, which are revealed to be putrid and deceptive.53 In accordance with Pauline teachings, the passage emphasizes the weakness of the flesh due to the senses, and the danger of sensual passion. Sceve presents his own version of the tempest of the passions in dizain 160: Estes vous donc, ô mortelz esbays De si estrange, et tant novelle chose? Elle a le Ciel serainé au Pays, Pour mieulx troubler la paix en mon coeur close. Et son doulx chant (si au vray dire l’ose, Et sans me plaindre il me faille parler) A tranquillé la tempeste par l’air Pour l’envoyer prendre possession En ma pensée, et là renoveller Ma tempestueuse, et longue passion. (D 160)

Hell exists as an inner state, located in the poet-persona’s heart and mind, rather than being an exterior place. The tempest is likewise internalized, rather than being actualized as extreme weather, as Dante describes in Inferno 5. Scève addresses unnamed mortals (readers? lovers? the dead?) to recount an extraordinary event in which Délie, unnamed, transfers the tempest from the outside world to the poet’s mind, in order to renew his enduring passion for her. This is followed directly by the dizain in which Scève expresses his jealousy toward Délie’s husband (D 161). Scève later resolves to abandon love and resume the use of reason: “Fuyant Amour, je suivray la Raison” (D 179.10). Dante also portrays experiences of flux concerning his love for Beatrice: in the Vita nuova, the young poet-persona realized he had to find another way, and exhorted himself to use reason (VN 38.1–2), culminating in the final vision of Beatrice and “la costanzia de la ragione” (the constancy of reason: VN 39.2). The purification by fire in Purgatorio 26 symbolizes such transformation, particularly pertinent to erotic desire and lyric poetry. Scève, like Dante, continues to devote himself to his beloved after his transformation. The theme of adulterous love and its consequences is common to Greek and Roman antiquity, to troubadours and courtly lyric, to Paolo and Francesca from Inferno 5, and to Scève, inter alia. Although Dante did not read Homer directly, he was familiar with the Troy saga, and knew Vergil’s

53 See Di Scipio, The Presence of Pauline Thought in the Works of Dante, 234–35.

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Aeneid thoroughly. The Homeric episode of Ares and Aphrodite was recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses (book 4) as that of Venus and Mars.54 Referring to the adulterous lovers Ares and Aphrodite in book 8 of the Odyssey, Amilcare Iannucci55 points out that Apollo denounces the couple. Apollo presides over poetry and reason, whose resources may be marshaled to recount and denounce irrational, destructive acts of passion such as the divine adultery recounted in Homer. The stability of marriage is disrupted by adulterous passion: Homer develops this in the divine sphere, among the gods, and among mortals with Menelaus, Helen, and Paris. The consequence is societal and emotional upheaval both on Olympus and on earth, and what is resolved with laughter in heaven must be purged through violence on earth in the Trojan war.56 Scève, who frequently draws on classical mythology, mentions Venus in twelve dizains, plus the huitain, which begins, “Non de Venus . . .” Mars is mentioned in two dizains, and the names together occur in D 109: Mars amoureux voulut baiser ma Dame, Pensant que fust Venus sa bien aymée. Mais contre luy soubdain elle s’enflamme, Et luy osta son espée enfumée. Quand je la vy en ce poinct estre armée. Fais, dy je lors, de ceste Cymeterre, Que je descende avec mes maulx soubz terre. Va: ta demande est, dit elle, importune. Car j’en veulx faire à tous si forte guerre, Qu’aulcun n’aura sur moy victoire aulcune. (D 109)

Délie shows a spirit so fierce that she announces with bravado that there will be no one left to challenge her, since she will destroy them all in battle. Both Scève and Délie are shown to have strong passion in them. In dizain 109, the poet requests that she send him to the underworld, that is, to hell. He seems to want her to put him out of his misery, to use the weapon on him. He plays on the word Cymeterre, which is close to “cimetiere,” and which also contains “terre,” as if to imply that his world is already dead, like a cemetery, and that in death he would enter the earth. In moyen français, a cimeterre, from the Italian scimitarra, is a type of sword with a curved blade (scimitar). Délie would become an angel of death wielding the blade to fell the poet.

54 See Amilcare Iannucci, “Forbidden Love: Metaphor and History (Inferno 5),” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, 96. 55 Iannucci, “Forbidden Love,” 94–95. 56 Iannucci, “Forbidden Love,” 95.

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Although Délie is often identified with the virgin goddess Artemis/Diana, she does not bear that identity in dizain 161. Scève’s love becomes extramarital when it emerges that Délie is married, and he expresses jealousy: Seul avec moy, elle avec son partie: Moy en ma peine, elle en sa molle couche. Couvert d’ennuy je me voultre en l’Ortie, Et elle nue entre ses bras se couche. Hà (luy indigne) il la tient, il la touche: Elle le souffre: et, comme moins robuste, Viole amour par ce lyen injuste, Que droict humain, et non divin, a faict. O saincte loy à tous, fors à moy, juste, Tu me punys pour elle avoir meffaict. (D 161)

Scève is tormented by being apart from Délie, who is in bed with her husband in a human, domestic scene, in contrast to the image of the goddess who commands the weather in the previous dizain 160. Scève is alone in hell, without company. He does not consider the marriage legitimate, although society does. Divine law is fair to all others except the poet-lover, who has a genuine (profound, divine) bond with Délie through his love for her. The marital bond violates the law of love, to which Scève is subject. He is punished, condemned, although she is the one who has committed the so-called crime of marrying the husband, who is dismissed as “indigne.” The fault is transferred to her, and he prefers to believe she is not content with her husband, but this does not equal in scale the hell of his deprivation. Whereas the couple Paolo and Francesca are punished together for their adulterous transgression, Scève is apart from his beloved, and suffers alone. Like the couple of Inferno 5 at the moment of their surrender, Scève the lover exhibits a total lack of contrition, displacing the adulterous transgression from himself (in relation to Délie’s marriage) to the husband, in accordance with courtly love. In Inferno 5 and in Délie, the husband is silent and absent, envisioned only as an obstacle to love. Scève, like Dante, is a spectator, and both are greatly invested in the unfolding drama. Dante implicitly compares his love for Beatrice to the love of Paolo and Francesca, and this may be what causes him to faint. Délie, like Francesca, is dominant over her lover; Scève writes the poetry that creates and evokes her, just as Dante does with Francesca, whose lover is an anonymous, silent Everyman. While Scève’s persona is not morally condemned, he finds himself in a figurative hell, to suffer as if condemned. Dante the pilgrim likewise does not condemn himself, even as Dante the poet condemns lust and relegates poets to the refining, reforming flames of Purgatory. Both Scève and Dante as poet-characters face purification involving flames that correspond to the flames

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of passionate love. The domination of Délie over the poet-lover is so strong that she is the source of his suffering and his relief, through hope (a fin’amor topos). In the Triumphus cupidinis, Petrarch denounces love as servitude, shifting between service to love and service to the lady. Scève seems to protest less vehemently about servitude, focusing mainly on his own situation as poetpersona, rather than on illustrious legend. For Petrarch, love brings down the man, defeats him, captures him, and destroys his independence and heroism; lovers are described as prisoners: Qual è morto da lui, qual con più gravi leggi mena sua vita aspra ed acerba sotto mille catene e mille chiavi. (TC, I, 85–87) (Some of his captives die forthwith; and some More pitilessly ruled, live out their lives Under a thousand chains and a thousand keys.)57

If love is hell for Petrarch, it resembles a prison, a labyrinth (cf. Rvf 211.14) without escape. Petrarch catalogues heroic figures laid low by their women, such as Hercules, Holofernes, and many others. Renunciation of love for him implies liberation from bondage. Scève writes of his simultaneous pleasure and suffering in contemplating Délie, who is not named: Tout en esprit ravy sur la beaulté De nostre ciecle et honneur, et merveille. Celant en soy la doulce cruaulté, Qui en mon mal si plaisamment m’esveille, Je songe et voy; et voyant m’esmerveille De ses doulx ryz, et excellentes moeurs. Les admirant si doulcement je meurs, Que plus profond à y penser je r’entre: Et y pensant, mes silentes clameurs Se font ouyr et des Cieulx, et du Centre. (D 228)

Scève’s response to Délie involves wonder: il est ravi, émerveillé, il songe, il admire. There is also clarity: il voit, il s’éveille, il pense. Délie embodies the courtly ideals of beauté, honneur, moeurs, and the charm of ris doux. Scève’s contemplation becomes so intense that he seemingly loses consciousness (“je meurs,” line 7), and plunges deeper into rêverie. The antithetical pairings douce-cruauté, silentes-clameurs, and éveille-meurs emphasize the double nature of the poet’s contemplation between

57 English translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi is by Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1962).

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wakefulness and a dream state. The mystical vision exists in either state of being. The poet-persona shouts, causing an incoherent cacophony: to express passion? frustration? joy? It is not clear from the dizain. Yet his vision is experienced mentally, in contemplative silence (line 9). Délie’s cruelty (line 3) is hidden, unlike her beauty, charm, and manners, which disguise it. Despite the mal, the poet-lover experiences pleasure. An erotic undercurrent is discernible here, evidenced by the line “je meurs” aligned with the adverb doucement. The last line of the poem has not been fully explicated. Parturier (1916) associates Scève’s use of the term centre with its usage in D 330 (“Au centre heureux, au coeur impenetrable,” etc.), but McFarlane is sceptical about this interpretation. The center of the earth is implied, McFarlane points out, but he does not develop this. The center of the earth according to Dante is the location of Hell (constriction), and the opposite of Hell is heaven, les cieux (the vast expanse of the cosmos). The clameurs of Scève, however silent they may be, are heard in heaven and hell, here juxtaposed. A center implies a circumference, meaning a circle or sphere.58 Dante’s cosmos in the Commedia is structured with circles: nine circles of Hell, terraces in Purgatory (a spiral encircling the mountain), and the celestial domains in Paradise, including the divine spheres of the sun, moon, and planets. I would posit that the last line of D 228 is Dantesque. Dante developed number symbolism to express cosmic order, particularly with the numbers three (the Trinity), nine (three squared), and ten (perfection). The total number of cantos in the Commedia is one hundred (ten squared), divided into three canticles; the three locations (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) have ten levels each.59 The entire poem is composed in interlacing terza rima, inscribing a trinitarian rhyme scheme throughout the poem. Dante associates Beatrice with nine (VN 29), symbolizing the harmony of creation. The number of Aristotelian categories of accidents is nine, plus substance, which makes ten fundamental categories: for Dante, love is an accident inhering in a substance (VN 25.1). The numbers three, nine, and ten form part of Scève’s textual

58 James Helgeson in Harmonie divine et subjectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 115–17, examines subjectivity in Délie conceived as a potentially infinite circle, after Nicholas of Cusa, building on Hans Staub’s Le curieux désir. Helgeson identifies two competing conceptions of the circle in Délie: expansive (cercle-potentialité) and restrictive (cercle-limite). 59 The neutrals comprise the first level in Inferno; the earthly paradise is the final level of Purgatory, and the Empyrean forms the tenth level in Paradiso. Scholars have offered various formulations for divisions based on Dante’s structures. The opening canto functions as prologue, preceding the invocation to the muses in Inf. 2 (an invocation occurs in each canticle). See Richard Lansing, “Numerology,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 653–57.

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architecture: emblems occur every ninth dizain.60 The total number of poems in Délie is 450, a multiple of three, nine, and ten; 4+5=9. The epigrammatic dizain form is 10 x 10, ten lines with ten syllables each. Délie has a triple identity associated with three moon goddesses. Scève refers to “neuf Cieulx” (D 4.3) and “le hault ciel Empirée” (D 4.1), the Empyrean. Structural aspects of Scève’s Microcosme, an ambitious project of scientific poetry of 3,003 lines in three parts with theological and cosmic themes, also recall Dante’s Commedia. A correlation emerges between Dante and Scève in their aforementioned poetic works, each of which is constructed with arrangements involving three, nine, and ten.

60 Edwin Duval discussed numbers in Délie in “Articulation of the Délie: Emblems, Numbers, and the Book,” Modern Language Review 75 (1980), 65–75.

6 Scève and Dante: “L’amor che qui raffina” Virtuous love is frequently associated with virtuous poetry, virtue implying purity. When Dante the pilgrim meets Statius in Purgatorio, Virgil speaks to Dante about love arising from virtue: “Amore, / acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese, / pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore” (Love that is kindled by virtue, will, in another, find reply, as long as that love’s flame appears without: Purg. 22.10–12). Such love is directed toward the quality of virtue, compared to a flame within the person. Virtue will find a response in kind if it gives an outward sign to be recognized. The immediate context in this discussion is asexual love between male poets (amenable to Ficino), but the link between love and virtue occurs in a courtly context as well, between lover and beloved lady, in the poetry of Dante and Scève. The love is evoked via the poetry, existing through the vehicle of poetry. Virtue is a necessary quality for the lady to merit the poet’s attentions, and, likewise, the poet must be virtuous to be worthy of loving her. Dante strove to love Beatrice in the right way in the Vita nuova, affirming at the conclusion that to be worthy, he must find the best way to speak of her (VN 42). In his other lyric production, Dante shows a preoccupation with virtue as an attribute of character in both the lover and beloved: virtue, beauty, and love are compatible, consistent with Platonic conceptions of love. In the canzone “Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire” (Tis sorrow rouses boldness in my heart), Dante exhorts ladies to cultivate virtue: “la beltà ch’Amore in voi consente, / a vertù solamente / formata fu dal suo decreto antico” (beauty, that Love has granted each of you, was by his old degree created but for virtue: 7–9). The good attribute attracts itself and brings delight: “simiglianza fa nascer diletto” (resemblance engenders pleasure: 63). Dante rejects a Cavalcantian definition of love as “appetito di fera” (feral appetite: 143). For Dante and Scève, virtue is essential to exalted (divine) love: it implies love between souls. It is distinct from a Christian ideal of caritas because it does not exclude the erotic. Concerning mythological parallels in Dante with the name Délie, the name “Delia” occurs once in the Commedia, in a cosmic reference to the moon: “il cinto di Delia” (Delia’s girdle or belt: Purg. 29.78), meaning the moon’s halo. Delia is Diana, the moon, so called because she was born on the island of Delos. Dante refers to her again as the daughter of Latona, analogous to the Greek Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo: così cinger la figlia di Latona vedem talvolta, quando l’aere è pregno, sì che ritenga il fil che fa la zona. (Par. 10.37–39)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-007

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(just so, at times, we see Latona’s daughter circled when saturated air holds fast the thread that forms the girdle of her halo.)

In this passage, the glow of the moon’s aura is likened to a girdle whose “thread” we perceive. The light of the aura surrounds (encircles) her, like a belt. Perhaps this passage in Purgatorio contributed to Scève’s choice of names for his beloved. Dante’s context for “il cinto di Delia” is a procession in which candles are carried whose flames leave a glow in their wake, and that glow contains the colors of the rainbow. The association of Delia with the moon and light that shines in darkness (like candlelight), illuminating shadows, is consistent with Scève’s Délie, in which light or flame is juxtaposed with ténèbres. Scève writes, “en moy tu luys la nuict obscure” (D 59.10). He enigmatically evokes the concept of being belted, in the sense of being surrounded (one meaning of the verb ceinturer being entourer): Ceincte en ce point et le col, et le corps Avec les bras, te denote estre prise De l’harmonie en celestes accordz, Où le hault ciel de tes vertus se prise. (D 173.1–4)

Scève’s use of the word “ceincte” with respect to Délie may be adapted from Dante’s phrase cinto di Delia. The troubadour Guilhem de Cabestanh, in “Ar vey qu’em vengut als jorns loncs,” speaks of being “cobertz, claus, e cins / D’amor” (covered, enclosed, and encircled by love: lines 27–28). In “En pessamen me fai estar Amors” (Love, giving me trouble, makes me wonder how), Guilhem expresses the desire for his beloved to hold him in her arms, enclosing him: “Qe. m volcsetz far de vostres bratz sentura” (line 30). Dante and Scève evoke the cosmic aspect of the crescent moon (Delia, Délie) functioning to bind or belt. Manifesting divine light (the moon’s aura) and divine music (the harmony of the spheres), heaven also treasures Délie’s virtues, which harmonize with the celestes accordz. Les bras signify Délie’s arms as well as the “arms” (or horns) formed by the crescent moon, in a passage similar to D 367, which concludes with an erotic image, “L’un coronner mon col, l’aultre mes hanches” (line 10). The poet-lover evokes the idea of being surrounded and embraced by Délie in several ways: with music and celestial harmony, with moonlight, and with her body. Bodily erotic experience is not excluded from Scève’s conception of love with Délie. The embrace in a joyous, divine place becomes elsewhere a trap or knot for the poet-lover in a miserable, forsaken place; hence it is dangerous, and yet the poet cannot extricate himself.

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The poet as fabbro In a mythological context, Scève, like Dante, presents the poet using imagery of a smith, a forger, a maker; here the poet’s heart and body contain the forge: Quand Titan a sué le long du jour, Courant au sein de sa vielle amoureuse, Et Cynthia vient faire icy sejour Pour donner lieu la nuict tenebreuse, Mon coeur alors de la fornaise umbreuse Ouvre l’Etna de mes flammes ardentes, Lesquelles sont en leur cler residentes, Et en leur bruyt durent jusques à tant, Que celle estainct ses lampes evidentes, De qui le nom tu vas representant. (D 356)

The reference to Titan (the sun) and to Cynthia (the moon) is discussed in the next chapter. In dizain 356, Scève develops the image of his body as an industrious forge, like that of Hephaistos (Roman Vulcan), emitting flames and sparks by night. His passionate desire burns through the night like the legendary Sicilian volcano, until Cynthia extinguishes the stars and night turns to day. The forge is a site for making things (metaphorically, for making poetry), a source of heat and energy. In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge who created the material world and human beings was like a fabbro: a smith, a maker. Dante and the stilnovo poets developed fabbro imagery, producing hard and perfected verses. Dante evokes the fabbro’s forge and Vulcan (Hephaistos) in Inferno 14.52–57. Vergil had alluded to Vulcan (Aen. 8.422), and to Aetna in the same passage as the location of his forge (Aen. 8.419). Dante’s love poets were purified in purgatorial fire so they and their verses would become pure; he performed a kind of editing and correcting of his poetic predecessors. In Paradiso, Dante compares God to a fabbro, articulated through the discourse of Beatrice, who instructs and corrects Dante the pilgrim: Lo moto e la virtù d’i santi giri, come dal fabbro l’arte del martello, da’ beati motor convien che spiri. (Par. 2.127–29) (The motion and the power of the holy spheres necessarily must breathe from the blessed movers, as the art of the hammer does from the smith.)

The metaphor of the smith’s forge and tools is extended to divine creation, besides the poet’s labors of composition. By implication, making poetry is divine,

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a reflection of the macrocosm in creation. Dante refers to Mount Aetna by name in his Latin eclogues.1 Petrarch names Aetna in the Triumphus Pudicitie (line 26), and in Rvf 41 mentions Vulcan, whose forge was located under Mount Aetna. However, Petrarch does not envisage the poet as fabbro or creator working in fire, as do Dante and Scève. The fabbro image is artisanal, neither aristocratic nor intellectual. Beyond the rhetorical claim of the poet’s inadequacy to describe and praise Laura sufficiently, Petrarch in the Canzoniere did not dwell on the process of making the poetry as craft, as Dante consciously had done in the Vita nuova with the interspersion of prose self-commentary with the poems (essentially sonnets and canzoni), and with the development of a manual for the composition of love poetry. For Dante, as for Scève, the love experience and the creation of the poetic work were consubstantial. Defaux acknowledges in Scève’s liminary huitain the poetic theme of creation, the forming of an object (comparable to the poet as fabbro).2 The process of creation is divine work, exemplified by the Judeo-Christian God or Platonic demiurge. The poet through his labors approaches the divine, as Dante the pilgrim ascended many levels to attain the divine light in Paradise (by composing the Commedia, which recounted the pilgrim’s journey), and as Scève’s poetry was purified in love’s flames. The flame, representing the love for Délie and poetry about her, would endure as long as the world existed, according to the concluding dizain: “Flamme si saincte en son cler durera” (D 449.1). Petrarch’s love for Laura manifests in the work of poetry, but the labors are not revealed, the sources are disguised, and the concern is for the polished, finished result, and for fame and accolades symbolized by the laurel. Petrarch labored for many years to perfect his lyric poetry, but did not style his poetic persona as a fabbro. His allusion to Vulcan related to the smith god’s forging of Cupid’s arrows, which struck Apollo and Daphne, not to the metaphorical labor needed to produce his poetic compositions, with emphasis on inspiration rather than striving to produce the poetry. Perhaps Petrarch sought to distinguish himself from Dante by emphasizing the polished final work, while hiding the efforts of composition and revision (refinement). It is beautiful poetry, but brought forth in shame and regret, according to the Canzoniere’s internal logic, if the poet considers his love to be sinful, necessitating the penitence and confessional aspect of the Canzoniere. Petrarch’s announced model is Apollo, who as a god does not struggle in creating poetry: the Muses, under Apollo’s purview, are the 1 See Tusiani, trans., and Di Scipio, ed., Dante’s Lyric Poems (rev. ed.), Egloga II, line 27 (“Ethna”) et passim. 2 Defaux: “[L]es deux derniers vers introduisent le thème du faire, de la création poétique” (Délie, vol. 2, p. 12).

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source of inspiration. Apollo fails to obtain his first love, Daphne (laurel), but when she flees and is transformed into a laurel tree, he crowns himself with her leaves (as Ovid recounts in Metamorphoses 1). Prior to Petrarch, Dante invokes Apollo for poetic inspiration: “O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro / fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso / come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro” (O good Apollo, for this last labor make me such a vessel of your power as you require to bestow the beloved laurel: Par. 1.12–14). Here Dante styles himself a Tuscan Apollo who merits the laurel for his poetry. The Commedia moves toward triumph (successful completion), whereas the Canzoniere moves toward elegy (loss in love, but poetic achievement). Scève writes in the huitain of Délie: “Amour (pourtant) les me voyant escrire / En ta faveur, les passa par ses flammes” (7–8). Scève writes his poetry for and about Délie, creating her as a literary character, his persona praising her in hopes of winning her favor. This occurs in the presence of the god of love, and the poetry is purified by his flames, just as the poet is seared by the flames of his love for the lady. The poetry, like the love it describes, achieves immortality after passing through love’s refining flames. The flames are not meant to purge love or desire from the poetry (or from the poet), but instead are proper to love. In Purgatorio, love refines the souls, preparing them for entry into Paradise: “l’amor che qui raffina” (the love that is refined here: Purg. 8.120). Fire purifies the lustful souls, lussuriosi, in the seventh terrace of Purgatory (Purg. 25–27). The fire that produces dangerous passion, ardor akin to lust, gives way to the fire that burns away lust, resulting in purity and virtue. The flames of passion are purified through the hard work of poetic refinement, like the soul striving to prepare to enter heaven, purged of flaws. One thinks of the smith working amid red-hot heat, beating the piece of metal until it takes the right shape, or the alchemist burning away impurities to attain the perfect substance: perfect soul, perfect love, perfect verses. When Dante compares the composition of poetry to the work of the fabbro (Purg. 26.117), he refers to Arnaut Daniel. At the conclusion of Purgatorio 26, Arnaut exhorts Dante in Occitan to remember his suffering, dolor, and he looks forward to future joy, lo joi. Then he disappears into the flames: “Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina” (Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them: Purg. 26.148). The refining flames of love and of poetry give way in Délie to Amour’s purifying flammes of the huitain, and to the commemorative “flamme si saincte” of the last dizain. In developing themes of creation and transformation, Dante uses a verb relating to alchemy, distillare: . . . quasi tutta cessa mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla nel core il dolce che nacque da essa. (Par. 33.61–63)

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(. . . my vision almost fades completely, yet it still distills within my heart the sweetness that was born of it.)

The distillation (here, of the vision’s sweetness) is an alchemical process that brings out a substance’s virtues or essential qualities. The process is comparable to that of purifying and refining poetry, and both Dante and Scève allude to it. Scève uses the verb distiller in a similar way to describe an extraordinary interior experience: “en te donnant à moy, tu m’estois Dame. / Lors je sentis distiler en mon ame / Le bien du bien, qui tout aultre surmonte” (D 133.4–6). As mentioned, Scève uses distiller in reference to sight in the opening line of dizain 388: “Ce doulx venin, qui de tes yeulx distille.” Distillation is consistent with other kinds of refinement imagery employed by the two poets. When Dante encounters Beatrice at the summit of Purgatory, the garments worn in the procession are white, green, and fiery red (Purg. 29), which correspond to the three theological virtues faith, hope, and charity.3 Landino’s commentary highlights the theological virtues aligned with these colors. The commentary of Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874) cites passages from Vergil’s Aeneid as inspiration for Dante’s color choices.4 Beatrice wears these colors, and the vivid red recalls the drappo sanguigno on her body in Dante’s dream vision from Vita nuova 3.4, and her attire at their initial encounter in VN 2.3 (sanguigno). Scève alludes to these three colors in the same order (blanc pur, vert gay, rouge ardent) in the first three lines of dizain 254, symbolizing the same three virtues. Scève’s “rouge ardent,” signifying charity, or love, corresponds to Dante’s “color di fiamma viva” (color of living flame: Purg. 30.33); in the procession the color is “vermigli” (crimson: Purg. 29.148). Critical editions of Délie have not cited Dante with regard to dizain 254, but Dante’s Commedia is a plausible source for the symbolic colors in this dizain, with the theological virtues and colors presented in identical order.5 “Marguerite” (D 254.10) is understood to be Marguerite de Navarre. A secondary meaning may be the pearl of the moon, implying Délie herself: marguerite (pearl) occurs in the following dizain (D 255.7), with Cytharée (Venus), freshly emerged and still pure from the sea. Dante describes the moon as “l’etterna margarita” (the eternal pearl: Par. 2.34). Arnaut Daniel alludes to the aforementioned colors (plus blue), without

3 Durling and Martinez, eds., Purgatorio, note to Purg. 30.31–33, 521. Paul in 1 Cor. 13:13 enumerates the three theological virtues, with love (caritas) being preeminent. 4 Tommaseo, Commento alla “Commedia,” ed. Valerio Marucci (Rome: Salerno, 2004), II, 1340. Aeneid 4, 6, 7, Georgics 4, Bucolics 2. 5 Parturier, McFarlane, Joukovsky, and Defaux do not explain the three colors in D 254; Parturier mentions the general importance of medieval color symbolism.

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explicating color symbolism, in the incipit of poem XIII: “Er vei vermeills, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs” (Now I see scarlet, green, blue, white, and yellow).6 The color green disappears in Dante’s Paradise, apparently because hope becomes superfluous next to perfection, fulfilment being attained.7 The color gold becomes prominent instead. For Scève in dizain 377, a golden color (couleur de paille and jaune) signifies “mon bien tant attendu” (D 377.5), and white symbolizes “pure foy, qui jouyssance honnore” (D 377.10). Attendu rhymes with entendu, “si chasque signe est par toy entendu” (D 377.4), with intimate understanding in the message conveyed by the poet-lover to his beloved: loyalty is rewarded. This line is consistent with Virgil’s discourse in Purgatorio 22.10–12 on love inspired in virtue through the mutual recognition of two kindred souls. Scève associates Délie’s virtue with pure gold: Car ta vertu de trop meilleur alloy, Qu’Or monnoyé, ny aultre chose exquise, Te veut du Ciel (ô tard) estre requise, Tant approchante est des Dieux ta coustume. (D 23.3–6)

At the dizain’s conclusion, the poet mentions her “sainct feu,” which will burn for posterity. Dante has Beatrice explain virtue to the pilgrim in terms of grades of substances, referring to the moon and its spots, and also to the body by analogy: “Virtù diverso fa diversa lega / col prezïoso corpo ch’ella avviva” (diverse virtue makes diverse alloy with the precious body it quickens: Par. 2.139–40).8 Each virtue is like a different alchemical substance; in the Commedia the qualities are ranked, with the best ones being closest to God. By the same token, since Délie’s virtues are of such high quality, heaven covets her. Scève’s use of color symbolism for white, green, red, and gold correlates with Dante’s.

6 James J. Wilhelm, The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel, 54–55. Arnaut’s colors in nature give rise to rhetorical expressions of beauty and longing for the beloved. This incorporates cosmic references through the poet’s impatience with the slow movements of the moon and sun: “lun’ e soleills, trop faitz lonc vostre cors!” (Moon and sun, you make your courses too long!: line 41). Arnaut’s Occitan love poem of six stanzas presents themes dear to Dante, Petrarch, and Scève: service to Love, sweet love-suffering, love as burning flame, the poet’s love enduring through time, and in the envoi, the poet’s inadequate skill to praise the beloved. 7 See H. D. Austin, “Heavenly Gold: A Study of the Use of Color in Dante,” Philological Quarterly 12 (1933): 44–53. 8 Translation of this passage is adapted from Singleton, quoted in Rachel Jacoff in “An Introduction to Paradiso,” Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., 111.

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The flames of love The metaphor of love as a searing flame that consumes or torments the lover is a topos from antiquity, and is found in medieval literature, the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, Scève, and many others. In book 4 of the Aeneid, Vergil evokes the passion of infelix Dido for Aeneas with flames: “At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / volnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni” (But the queen for a long while, marked with an incurable wound, nourished the wound with the blood of her veins and was consumed by a hidden flame: Aen. 4.1–2).9 Vergil continues in book 4: “His dictis incensum animum inflammavit amore / spemque dedit dubiae menti solvitque pudorem” (With these words she fanned into flame the queen’s love-enkindled heart, put hope in her wavering mind, and loosed the bonds of shame: Aen. 4.55–56). The unfortunate Dido burns with love for Aeneas: “uritur infelix Dido” (unhappy Dido burns: Aen. 4.68). And later: “ardet amans Dido traxitque per ossa furorem” (Aen. 4.101; Dido is on fire with love, and has drawn the madness through her veins: Aen. 4.101). Juno refers to Dido as “miserrima Dido” (Aen. 4.117). Vergil uses “culpam” (Aen. 4.172) in reference to Dido: her misdeed, her fault, her wrong, culpa; whereas Dido was not independently responsible for falling in love with Aeneas, according to Vergil’s own narrative; she was a pawn of the gods, particularly Venus. Thus she is worthy of compassion, for Vergil also remarks, “improbe Amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis ire iterum in lacrimas” (merciless love, to what do you not drive the hearts of mortals: Aen. 4.412–13). Dido’s situation is ambiguous, since she betrays the honor of her dead husband, and yet she is not evil or depraved; she falls in love, she surrenders to love, she suffers, she is abandoned by her beloved Aeneas, and she dies, devastated. The flame of Dido’s desire, once kindled, continues to burn (“flamma,” Aen. 4.66), leading to her death.10 Dido figures in emblem 13 (Figure 6) of Délie, and in the corresponding lines of D 114: “Croire fauldra, que la Mort doulce soit, / Qui l’Ame peult d’angoisse delivrer” (9–10). The suffering is without remedy, so acute that although death usually induces fear, it becomes a relief from suffering. The subtext being sexual desire, release from it through “la Mort doulce” could imply jouissance. The word “jouyssance” is used in the last line of dizain 377, as the anticipated reward for loyalty, in accordance with the troubadours. When Scève asks Délie for death

9 Text and translation (with modification) are from Vergil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 1932). 10 Vergil writes of Dido: “Est mollis flamma medullas / interea, et tacitum vivit sub pectore volnus” (love’s flame eats into her gentle flesh and love’s wound works silently in her breast: Aeneid 4.66–67).

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Figure 6: Maurice Scève, Délie (Lyon, 1544). Emblem 13, Dido qui se brusle (“Doulce la mort qui de dueil me delivre”). The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

by Mars’s stolen scimitar in dizain 109, he seeks relief, a coup de grâce. Concerning Dante’s appropriation of Dido’s experiences from Vergil’s Aeneid 4, Rachel Jacoff comments: Dido’s experience of the ancient flame becomes literal, since the passion she feels will lead to her suicidal funeral pyre. This passion, which leads to death, is the very opposite of Dante’s love for Beatrice, a love that redeems him from spiritual death. Dante’s fidelity to Beatrice was interrupted, as this canto [Purg. 30] reminds us, but ultimately it becomes the defining loyalty of his life; Dante feels the marks of the antica fiamma for his antico amor so that the continuity of his love for Beatrice takes precedence over any intervening apostasies of affection.11

Instead of renouncing or suppressing his love for Beatrice, Dante validates (confesses) it. By the same token, Scève validates Délie’s merit as an object worthy of his love, which itself is also worthy, proven by long suffering. Dante’s long-standing loyalty to Beatrice is similar to Scève’s long-standing loyalty to

11 Rachel Jacoff on Purgatorio 30, in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, 347.

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Délie (cf. D 377), trumping past errors. Scève’s love undergoes purification in love’s flames, just as his poetry about her (about his love for her, and about her vertu) likewise passes through love’s flames to be refined. Passing through Purgatory, one becomes worthy: “diventa degno” (Purg. 1.6). Petrarch employs imagery of burning fire to illustrate his love, but the fire does not purify him or lead to ecstasy, even during agony: “Di mia morte mi pasco et vivo in fiamme” (I feed on my death and live in flames: Rvf 207.40). This is not a process, a stage leading to transcendence. Petrarch’s love leads to suffering from unrequited love, and his ambivalence and renunciation mark it as negative, pointing ultimately to damnation in a Christian moral schema. Troubadour precedessors who focused on the idea of a renunciation of love include the Genoese troubadour Folquet de Marseille (It. Folchetto or Folco), admired by Dante (see DVE 2.6), who later renounced his love poems and fin’amor. Renunciation of love in a pagan context was a topos in antiquity (for example, Ovid’s Remedia amoris and Heroides). Renunciation through a Christian conversion was a different matter, as with Folquet or Guittone d’Arezzo. In Rvf 264, Petrarch calls the flame of his love for Laura a falsehood, prefiguring Rvf 366: Ella l’accese, et se l’ardor fallace durò molti anni in aspettando un giorno che per nostra salute unqua non vene, or ti solleva a più beata spene mirando ’l ciel che ti si volve intorno immortal et adorno; ché dove del mal suo qua giù sì lieta vostra vaghezza acqueta un mover d’occhi, un ragionar, un canto, quanto fia quel piacer, se questo è tanto? (Rvf 264.45–54) (She set it afire, and if the deceiving flame has lasted many years, awaiting a day that, luckily for our salvation, will never come, now raise yourself to a more blessed hope by gazing at the heavens that revolve about you, immortal and adorned; for if down here your desire, so happy in its ills, is satisfied by a glance, a talk, a song, what will that pleasure be, if this is so great?)

Petrarch is already urging himself to renounce his love for Laura, and instead to place his hope in salvation and the more substantial (and morally strict) divine joy of heaven. Here the “ardor fallace” endures (with the verb durare). The last line uses a stilnovo and fin’amor motif comparing a fleeting moment to imagined future pleasure. Some poems later, the reader learns of Laura’s death, which traditionally has marked a division in the Canzoniere.

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In the first canto of Dante’s Commedia, Virgil the pilgrim’s guide prefigures Dante’s imminent journey through Purgatory: e vederai color che son contenti nel foco, perché speran di venire quando che sia, a le beate genti. (Inf. 1.118–20) and you will see those who are content in the fire, because they hope to come, whenever it may be, to the blessed people.

Purgatory is identified as the place where souls are purified by fire, and the pilgrim encounters poets on the seventh terrace. Scève also braves the flames hoping to attain his beatitude, Délie, as well as to achieve excellent poetry with Love bearing witness. The refining process can be painful, as Virgil tells Dante in Purgatory while Dante fearfully contemplates the purifying flames; Virgil explains that here there can be torment, but not death (Purg. 27.21). For Scève, whose poet-lover is extinguished symbolically in the dizain sequence, there is likewise torment but not death, and the ultimate result is good. An implication in both poetic texts is that love conquers death, and moreover, that love’s inscription in poetry can conquer death through a form of immortality. Scève associates Délie with cosmic harmony. Celestial harmony involves the metaphysical “music” of the spheres, which is imitated on earth in inferior form according to Platonic theory. Concordia discors signifies the encounter of opposites that results in harmony through synthesis, a central theme in Délie.12 Order emerges out of disorder, union from disparate elements. While the structure of Scève’s dizain sequence does not consistently reflect a steady, ordered progression toward coalescence and fulfilment, there is still a diffuse progression of sorts, with concordia emerging at points throughout the sequence. Dante’s Commedia is structured with hierarchy and symmetry to progress from chaos and darkness to harmony, order, light, and perfect virtue. In Dante’s heaven, harmonious music emanates from the celestial bodies, sung by blessed souls: Diversi voci fanno dolci note: così diversi scanni in nostra vita rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote. (Par. 6.124–26) Different voices make sweet notes: thus different thrones in this our life produce a sweet harmony among these wheels.)

12 See the introduction of James Helgeson, Harmonie divine et subjectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (2001).

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Whereas Dante refers to the harmony among many souls, Scève focuses on the dynamic between himself and Délie, having referred to divine harmony in general: Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes, Mais des haultz cieulx l’Angelique harmonie, Tiennent encor en telle symphonie, Et tellement les oreilles concordes, Que paix, et guerre ensemble tu accordes En ce concent, que lors je concevoys: Car du plaisir, qu’avecques toy j’avoys, Comme le vent se joue avec la flamme, L’esprit divin de ta celeste voix Soubdain m’estainct, et plus soubdain m’enflamme. (D 196)

Even here, the initial idea of les mortz is evoked, with renewal and extinction repeated. James Helgeson associates harmony with the dissolution of self and other (soy, tu), “tu” being the origin of effects on the poet-lover, such that instability is inevitable and harmony brings complications.13 Hints of ecstasy, aligned with musical harmony, appear in certain dizains such as this quatrain: Leuth resonnant, et le doulx son des cordes Et le concent de mon affection, Comment ensemble unyment tu accordes Ton harmonie avec ma passion! (D 344.1–4)

Ecstasy follows the poet-lover’s preparatory process of refinement (travailler), cited below. As Diotima does with Socrates, and Beatrice with Dante, Délie teaches Scève about love: Incessamment travaillant en moy celle, Qui à aymer enseigne, et reverer, Et qui tousjours par sa doulce estincelle Me fera craindre, ensemble et esperer, En moy se voit la joye prosperer Dessus la doubte à ce coup sommeilleuse. Car sa vertu par voye perilleuse Me penetrant l’Ame jusqu’au mylieu, Me fait sentir celle herbe merveilleuse Qui de Glaucus jà me transforme en Dieu. (D 436)

Joy transforms the poet into a god. This dizain strays far from orthodox Christian theology, and to explicate the lover becoming a god would be difficult within

13 Helgeson, Harmonie divine, 83.

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Christian hermeneutics. Defaux insists that “La délectation est spirituelle.”14 Defaux finds that Scève’s source for the Glaucus reference (found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13.900—14.69) is Tullie’s praise of a Titian painting.15 Glaucus is not found in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, though he is briefly cited in book 2 of the Triumphus cupidinis, but reduced to an impersonal mythological reference, without any relation to Petrarch’s poet-persona. Boccaccio discusses Glaucus and Circe in Genealogia deorum gentilium 4.14. However, here is Glaucus in Dante’s Paradiso: Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba che ’il fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi. (Par. 1.67–69) (Gazing at her [Beatrice] I became within what Glaucus became tasting the herb that made him a consort of the other gods in the sea.)

This passage is closer in meaning to Scève’s dizain 436 than is the Tullie commentary, because Dante is transformed only in the presence of his beloved Beatrice, gazing at her: “nel suo aspetto.” Each poet-lover, Dante and Scève, tastes the herb and compares himself in transformation to Glaucus, who became divine, a sea god. As Giuseppe Di Scipio points out, Dante cannot directly claim to become a god, which would be blasphemous; so the poet draws a comparison.16 Scève writes quite directly, “jà me transforme en Dieu” (D 436.10). He does not seem concerned about blasphemy or idolatry concerning Délie. Dante employs a neologism directly following the passage cited above: the verb trasumanare (Par. 1.70), “to pass beyond the human,” “to transcend.” It is plausible that Scève is aligned with Dante in the Ovidian allusion to Glaucus concerning transformation into a god in the presence of the beloved. Early in Paradiso, Beatrice and Dante the pilgrim enter the sphere of the Moon, described as l’etterna margarita (Par. 2.34). Dante writes: . . . se corpo in corpo repe— accender ne dovria più il disio di veder quella essenza in che si vede come nostra natura e Dio s’unio. Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede, non dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto a guisa del ver primo che l’uom crede. (Par. 2.39–45)17

14 15 16 17

See Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 436, p. 470. See Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 436, pp. 470–71. Di Scipio, Pauline Thought, 255. This passage is cited in Di Scipio, Pauline Thought, 259.

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(. . . if body coincide with body— it should kindle within us more desire to see that Essence where is seen how our nature and God became one. There we shall see that which we hold by faith, and not by demonstration, but it will be self-evident, like the first truth one believes.)

The moon turns out to be cloud-like, rather than being solid, dense matter; according to Dante, the moon emits its own light, besides receiving light from the sun.18 This “corpo” passage refers to light entering water (an abstract analogy) without any displacement, but if we examine the surrounding vocabulary, a subtext emerges: corpo in corpo repe (recepe/riceve, “receives”), accendere, disio, essenza, nostra natura, s’unio. This language hints at union. Driven by the fire of longing for pure essence, Dante and Beatrice reunite in a divine place, without material displacement. At the same time, nature and God were united (literally, they “united themselves,” or “joined to each other,” in the pronominal verb expressing reciprocity). The words disio and accendere belong to the vocabulary of lovepassion and religious (or mystical) discourse. Even if Dante did not intend any direct allusion to union in amore rather than spiritual, Christian caritas, the subtext is present through Dante’s deliberate language (it is fair to surmise that Dante wrote with mastery and awareness of his language). Elsewhere in Paradiso, Dante uses carità infrequently to refer to love. In Par. 3.71 and 3.77, the nun Piccarda Donati (who did not keep her vow of chastity, and inhabits the sphere of the moon) mentions carità twice; she explains to Dante that the “virtù di carità,” Christian spiritual love, calms the will so that souls do not long for more bliss than what their assigned place affords them. However, Dante describes Piccarda thus, just before she responds to his query: “ch’arder parea d’amor nel primo foco” (like one who burns with love’s first flame: Par. 3.69). Amor is never far from Dante, especially in Paradise. Dante indicates that he made his journey in soul and body.19

18 See Singleton, Paradiso, vol. 2, Commentary, Par. 2, 43 (in note 32, Singleton cites De Monarchia III, 4, 17–18, for Dante’s statement that the moon emits its own light). 19 For passages in the Commedia demonstrating that Dante made his journey in soul and body, see Di Scipio, The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso, 24–25; Di Scipio argues that Dante’s vision is a Pauline visio corporalis (25). In Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), Marianne Shapiro examined Dante’s textual representations of bodies and souls in the Commedia, drawing on classical and theological sources, and showing how their materiality varied.

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Medieval allegorical readings posited multiple levels of exegesis. Dante writes in the last canto of the Commedia: E io ch’al fine di tutt’i disii appropinquava, sì com’io dovea, l’ardor del desiderio in me finii. (Par. 33.46–48) (And I, as I approached the goal of all desires, perfected within me, as I should, the ardor of my desire.)

Fulfilment is indicated, contingent on the interpretation of the substantive fine and the verb finire. An essential phrase in the passage is l’ardor del desiderio, reinforced by a positive sense of obligation and inevitability from the previous line (sì com’io dovea), a joyous fate and exalted outcome of the quest in which the individual is subsumed within cosmic movement. These Dantean passages parallel Scève’s longing: “L’ardent desir du hault bien desiré, / Qui aspiroit à celle fin heureuse” (D 82.1–2), in which we find corresponding vocabulary involving ardor, desire, and end (fin) as culmination. The poet-lover seeks fulfilment with Délie in “Saincte Union” (D 134.1). As goddess of the moon, Délie can take different forms, human and celestial. She could be with Scève’s poet-persona in her divine domain of the moon. Scève’s reading of Dante may have contributed to his characterization of Délie. Scève uses marguerite (D 255.7) in alluding to Venus as a sea goddess who is still pure, “En volupté non encor esgarée” (line 3). The pearl is analogous to the full moon in its beauty, luminescence, and spherical shape. An erotic connotation emerges from the vocabulary. In another dizain, Scève writes of the union of corps: Les elementz entre eulx sont ennemys, Movantz tousjours continuelz discors: Et toutefois se font ensemble amys Pour composer union de ce corps. (D 392.1–4)

Like Dante, Scève employs discourse based on scientia to discuss love: in this case, love as a conflict similar to tensions among the four elements; Délie’s disdain for the poet-lover induces him to compare her to Eris, goddess of discord (Latin: Discordia) from Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony. Whereas Dante attains spiritual union with Beatrice, Scève here yearns for elusive union; the dizain recalls the Dantean passage from Paradiso 2 cited above, in the sphere of the moon. Dizain 392 illustrates the ancient topos, adopted by early modern writers,

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of concordia discors.20 Heraclitus defined love as “harmonia” and stated that from the tension of opposites in conflict comes harmony, accomplished through discord. In dizains 392 and 447, the relation between Scève the poet-persona and Délie reflects this idea, through the material elements. The final result is harmony, as Dante also indicates in Paradiso. Harmony is attained in the cosmic Empyrean, to which Scève refers in dizain 4: Voulant tirer le hault ciel Empirée De soy à soy grand’ satisfaction, Des neuf Cieulx a l’influence empirée Pour clorre en toy leur operation. (D 4.1–4)

In his edition of Délie, Defaux points to Dante as a source for both “Empirée” and “les neuf Cieulx.” The nine spheres, with the sun at the center, originated with Pythagorean cosmogony, as McFarlane notes. Defaux disputes McFarlane’s interpretation of empirée in line 3 as “weakened,” and I would concur that it does not make sense within the context of the passage. According to the Dictionnaire Huguet, the verb empirer can signify “altérer,” but empirée would imply that the nine heavenly spheres manifest in Délie as a divine creature, while they are under the influence of the Empyrean. According to Defaux, Isabelle Pantin in La Poésie du Ciel en France (1995) posited that empirée was used in its etymological sense of fire: “le haut ciel ... a ‘enflammé’ ... l’influence des neuf cieux.”21 A logical source for this dizain is Dante’s Commedia. The Empyrean according to Dante was based on Aristotle’s physical system imposed on a Platonic model: it was the outermost of the concentric heavenly spheres. Empyrean, from the Greek empyrios, means “fiery.”22 Each cosmic body, including the moon and planets, occupied its own sphere. The Empyrean was immaterial, the mind of God, whereas the Primum Mobile was the greatest material body spinning within it.23 The tenth heaven of the Empyrean was a Christian addition to the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe, beyond the rotating spheres.24 The Neoplatonic conception of the Empyrean was divine reality as light, consciousness,

20 On Scève’s use of concordia discors and poetic motifs from music, see Helgeson, Harmonie divine et subjectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (2001). Xavier Bonnier has analyzed concordia discors and metaphor in Mes silentes clameurs, part 3, chap. 1, pp. 403–31. 21 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 4, p. 20. Defaux notes the Dantean significance of the number nine from the Vita nuova. 22 See Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 15–35. See also Moevs, “Empyrean,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 341–42. 23 See Convivio 2.3.3–7. 24 Moevs, Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 17.

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and the fire of love.25 The fiery motif is consistent with Scève’s use of flames and ardeur to illustrate love, a microcosm of the vast universe. Dante uses the words empireo ciel in Inferno 2.21, in the context of Aeneas being chosen as father of Rome, and the pagan empire would become the Christian one. Dante enters the Empyrean sphere in Paradiso 30, evoking his memory of Beatrice’s sweet smile, and the first time he saw her eyes (Par. 30.26–29). He experiences the flash of light and sees the candida rosa.

Endings The conclusion of the Canzoniere is Dantesque in certain ways: Petrarch, like Dante, includes a supplication to the Virgin Mary for salvation, writing, “vera beatrice” (true blessing, true happiness: Rvf 366.52).26 Perhaps Petrarch intends to correct Dante here, invoking the proper recipient for praise. The prayer in Paradiso 33 is pronounced by Bernard of Clairvaux. According to Dante, Beatrice is present with the other saints (Par. 33.38), and Dante does not renounce his love for her; the pilgrim successfully completes his extraordinary journey. While Laura is also in heaven, Petrarch in canzone 366 feels compelled to relinquish his love for her, so his focus shifts from Laura to the Virgin Mary. The conclusion of Délie presents the topos of love enduring through time by means of the poet’s achievement, consistent with Dante’s ambition to extol Beatrice in poetry. The last dizain of Scève’s poetic sequence is a far cry from Petrarch’s concluding canzone and prayer: Flamme si saincte en son cler durera, Tousjours luysante en publicque apparence, Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera, Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence. Aussi je voy bien peu de difference Entre l’ardeur, qui noz coeurs poursuyvra, Et la vertu, qui vive nous suivra Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large. Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge. (D 449)

In this dizain, Scève fuses erotic desire with virtue: ardeur (located in the heart) and vertu (which endures beyond death). He adheres to the courtly model of 25 Moevs, “Empyrean,” The Dante Encyclopedia, 341. 26 Petrarch uses the adjective “beatrice” elsewhere, in Rvf 72 and 191; in Rvf 191 the poet uses the word to refer to his own thoughts of Laura (thus, to himself).

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love, honoring his lady who will be remembered in his verses.27 As Helgeson points out, the synthesis of lover and beloved leaves a material trace in its wake, the stone monument.28 The fusion of love and virtue is also Neoplatonic, and synthesizes eros and agape. The love of Dante and Beatrice likewise appears to synthesize eros and agape, Dante’s ardore encountering Beatrice’s virtù within the cosmic order governed by love, in contrast to Petrarch’s ardor fallace (Rvf 264). A fusion of eros and agape does not occur for Petrarch’s persona. McFarlane comments, “Much is made of the influence which Délie can have by her virtue on that of other mortals and especially the poet himself; through Délie’s absence, the poet attains greater calm and greater vertu.”29 My position differs from that of Skenazi and Donaldson-Evans, who posit a conversion to the spiritual life, particularly in Scève’s final dizain; Skenazi speaks of conversion as part of “une expérience religieuse.”30 If there were a Christian conversion akin to Petrarch’s, then Scève’s dizains might renounce his passion for Délie, instead substituting a nonerotic, charitable, spiritual love. This is not my reading of dizain 449, nor of the overall recueil. Instead of the Petrarchan laurel, Scève substitutes the juniper, which is also evergreen (Du Bellay would use the olivier, and Ronsard, the myrtle). The genièvre evokes the love of Lancelot31 for Guinevere (their love story having incited Paolo and Francesca to indulge their desire). Juniper also recalls the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) of the Florentine aristocrat Ginevra de’ Benci (born ca. 1458), perhaps commissioned by Bernardo Bembo, and painted ca. 1474–1478 (Figure 7).32 Ginevra’s face has a grave and melancholic expression. Her beauty inspired poems by Cristoforo Landino and Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Ginevra composed poetry herself. The juniper (It. ginepro) of the background and obverse (Figure 8) symbolized female virtue and formed a pun on Ginevra’s name. The Latin motto in the impresa (obverse), virtutem forma decorat (beauty adorns virtue), connects virtue and beauty. In the upper right corner, a fiery red orb appears, perhaps a 27 In “En pessamen me fai estar Amors” (Love, giving me trouble, makes me wonder how), Guilhem de Cabestanh evokes his desire for his lady’s embrace, “En tot aitant cum ten lo mons e dura” (line 31): as long as the world endures, the poet desires that above all else. 28 Helgeson, Harmonie divine, 133. 29 McFarlane, Délie, 41 and 42. 30 See Skenazi, Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne, 40–44, with quote from 40, and Donaldson-Evans’s article, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” 31 Henri Weber, La création poétique, 201. 32 The portrait in oil on wood is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Ginevra’s brother Giovanni was Leonardo da Vinci’s friend, and Ginevra married Luigi Niccolini in 1474. See www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.50724.html.

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Figure 7: Leonardo da Vinci, portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (recto). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

full moon against the dark background. The impresa contains a sprig of juniper, palm, and laurel. Juniper generally conferred protection, particularly for travelers, and the Romans burned juniper to release its powers.33 The portrait and impresa allude to poetry, love, virtue, beauty, and juniper, themes found in Délie. Scève addresses Délie, writing of “ton sainct Pourtraict” and “ta figure” as being “Idole mienne” (D 297). The term “mortel Letharge” (D 449.10) probably comes directly from Petrarch, “mortifero letargo” (Triumphus temporis, 75), but as usual, Scève alters the context and the overall sense; “mortifero letargo” occurs in a passage unrelated to Laura or to love, indicating the ineluctable passage of time obliterates human achievements.34 Scève responds to the Petrarchan letargo passage

33 Raymond C. and Virginia A. La Charité, “‘A sa Délie’: The Text of the Text,” in A Scève Celebration, 20. 34 The source proposed for Petrarch’s “mortifero letargo” comes from Horace, Serm. II, 3, 145: “lethargo grandi est oppressus . . .” See Pacca and Paolino, eds., Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), note on p. 490.

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Figure 8: Leonardo da Vinci, portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (obverse). Inscription: “Virtutem forma decorat.” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

by asserting that the juniper, symbol of love between the poet and Délie, will endure; by extension, the poetry (Délie) will last despite time’s passing, untouched by the oblivion of Lethe. In addition to the Petrarchan “mortel Letharge,” a textual echo informs the sense and context of Scève’s Letharge in dizain 449 from Purgatorio 26, spoken by Guinizzelli to Dante the pilgrim: . . . Tu lasci tal vestigio per quel ch’i’odo in me, e tanto chiaro, che Leté nol può tòrre né far bigio. (Purg. 26.106–8) (. . . You are leaving such a trace in me because of what I hear, and so clear a one, that Lethe cannot take it away or make it fade.)

Like Guinizzelli, Scève will protect important memories from oblivion. For Dante, through the words of Guinizzelli, poetry (traces, impressions of writing) may be read and transmitted through echoes. Here, Dante reverses chronology, as if Guinizzelli, his predecessor, becomes an imitator in relation to Dante the

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poet. A vestigio (footprint) is made during an encounter, and the vestigio, analogous to les vestiges of Délie, are clearly delineated as impacting the lover in Scève’s poetry. Beatrice exhorts Dante and Statius to drink from the waters of Lethe (Purg. 33.96) and Eunoè (Purg. 33.127) as a final purification. The memory of experience is obliterated, and they are filled only with memory of the good. Scève adopts Guinizzelli’s position, created by Dante the poet, in resisting the compulsory oblivion imposed on Dante the pilgrim. In Délie as Other (1994), Nancy Frelick examines the last three dizains of Délie in comparison to the Commedia. Frelick notes that Délie is pagan, whereas Beatrice is a Christian guide who, unlike Virgil, can enter Paradise. Frelick identifies the ambiguous immortality in the last dizain, framed in pagan terms. It does not embrace absolute eternity, but is relative to the continued existence of the world and nature: “Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera, / Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence” (D 449.3–4). This is not a Christian idea, and Amour here does not signify Christian charity or Christian virtue. According to Frelick, Délie cannot lead the poet to immortality; she comments, “Scève’s persona stays in the world that is characterized by Virgil in the Commedia.”35 We may interpret the lines cited above from a literary perspective, relevant for the way Petrarch concluded his cycle: the poetry, and therefore the love between Scève and Délie enshrined within it, will endure as long as people in the world read it and revere love. Narratives and poetry survive when they are preserved and transmitted in oral or written form. The classical legacy that early modern humanists prized, including Latin poetry, was recorded and transmitted in the fragmentary written form of literature (letters, Lat. litterae). The emotions and love evoked survive through textual memory. According to Michel Beaujour, as an allegorical narrative, Dante’s Commedia progresses toward a goal in time and space, and its “places” (topoi) constitute memory-spaces as well as a disposition of lieux.36 This makes Dante’s text a discursive memorial of a visionary experience. For Scève, who records his love for Délie in his long sequence of epigrams, death encompasses forgetfulness, oblivion, and mortel Letharge (D 449.10). Délie does not have the same progression or structure as the Commedia, but it is a textual memorial, symbolized by the flamme si saincte (D 449.1). As a reader of love poetry, Scève contributed to a tradition that would endure, as the writings of previous poets had endured for him to read. That is the iteration of eternity in dizain 449, not a Petrarchan conversion or Dantesque journey to God, but a text transmitted

35 Frelick, Délie as Other, 117. 36 See Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, rhétorique de l’autoportrait (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 31.

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through reading and inscribed in memory. The sacred flame in the dizain’s first line, “Flamme si saincte en son cler” (D 449.1), symbolizes love and memory. Frelick frames the ambiguous immortality of dizain 449 in terms of Dante’s Christian hierarchy, in which Délie would be below Beatrice because Délie is not located in a Christian heaven. Allusions to motifs in Dante’s Commedia appear in Délie without Dante’s hierarchical architecture. Dante might have relegated Délie to the limbo of Virgil and other virtuous pagans, but Scève did not place Délie in a hierarchy analogous to the one Beatrice inhabits; both Beatrice and Délie are celestial, divine figures. A spiritual or mystical vision does not necessarily conform to Christian doctrine. Like Dante in Paradiso, Scève does not truly reveal to us what happened at the pinnacle of ecstasy, since even poetic language is inadequate, but he indicates through silence, as does Dante, that there was ecstasy (e.g., dizains 4, 7, 228, 436). Dante recounts, “vidi cose che ridire / né sa né può chi di là sù discende” (I have seen things that one who comes down from there cannot remember and cannot utter: Par. 1.5–6). Scève initially alludes to the perfection of Délie’s body, a delight for the gods, having cosmic significance: Car de tout bien, voyre es Dieux desirable, Parfeit un corps en sa parfection, Mouvant aux Cieulx telle admiration, Qu’au premier oeil mon ame l’adora. (D 2.5–8)

The French root of “perfect” (from Latin perfectus, the verb perficere), repeated in line 6 through parfeit and parfection, emphasizes the sense of work completed and the highest possible ideal, perfection. The perfection is such that the heavens are moved to admire it; Délie is associated with the full moon in this context, and embodies Pandora at the end of the dizain, as a woman with a beautiful body. In Délie, as McFarlane puts it, the theme emerges of “perfection in the beloved being so exalted that the power of reason (conseil) is useless.”37 The passage is Dantesque, recalling Beatrice’s attributes (for example, Par. 27). This overcoming of the individual will in the presence of love, the state of marvel, is comparable to the words of Dante in Purg. 30 when Beatrice appears, veiled: sanza de li occhi aver più conoscenza, per occulta virtù che da lei mosse, d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza. (Purg. 30.37–39)

37 McFarlane, ed, The Délie of Maurice Scève, 39.

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(without having more knowledge through the eyes, because of hidden power that moved from her, [my spirit] felt the great force of ancient love.)

Charles Singleton notes that “occult virtue” occurs in medieval narrative.38 Rachel Jacoff writes that Purgatorio 30 “is commonly regarded as the structural and emotional center of the Comedy, its kernel or nucleus,” and the Commedia and the Vita nuova unite here.39 She notes that in this canto, since Dante is named exactly when his poetic father is superseded, the movement from Virgil to Beatrice coincides with Dante’s poetic coming-of-age. Lest we consider Beatrice to be conflated with the Virgin Mary for Dante, Michelangelo Picone notes: [È] la ragione salvifica del viaggio ultraterreno dell’agens, del suo passaggio dall’ oscurità del peccato alla luce della grazia divina; ma al tempo stesso indicano chi sta dietro tale viaggio, e qual è la sua meta agognata: il ritorno a Beatrice. La donna che attende “di sopra” l’arrivo del suo fedele non può quindi essere, come hanno sostenuto molti commentatori, la Vergine Maria, ma deve essere Beatrice: colei che all’inizio del poema aveva avviato l’operazione del riscatto del poeta-pellegrino, e che ora si accinge a concluderla definitivamente.40 ([It is] the salvific reason for the journey beyond earth of the agens (agent), of his passage from the darkness of sin to the light of divine grace; yet at the same time they indicate the one who is behind such a journey, and what is the coveted destination: the return to Beatrice. The lady who awaits the arrival “up above” of her faithful one therefore cannot be, as many commentators have maintained, the Virgin Mary, but she must be Beatrice: she who at the beginning of the poem had begun the operation of the redemption of the poet-pilgrim, and who now is about to conclude it definitively.)

Dante’s pilgrimage constitutes then, among other things, a return to Beatrice, whom he loves; love and Beatrice contribute to the motivation underlying the quest as inscribed in Dante’s poetry. The canto portrays a felicitous reunion. At the end of Paradiso 33, Dante alludes to love as the primordial cosmic force: ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (Par. 33.143–45)

38 Singleton, Purgatorio, vol. 2, Commentary, note to line 38, p. 739, with Decameron 2.6 cited as example. 39 See Rachel Jacoff, Purgatorio 30, in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, 341–52, esp. 341. 40 Michelangelo Picone, “Purgatorio 30,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2001), 409.

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(already my desire and will were turned, like a wheel being moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.)

In this concluding passage of the Commedia, Dante’s desire and will are no longer his own, but are subsumed in the cosmic movement of the heavenly bodies, balanced and overcome by a divine vision that comes to him in a flash, and whose content the poet does not reveal, since words, the instruments of reason, are insufficient. The last word in each canticle of the Commedia is stelle (stars). Scève’s persistent emphasis on the moon shifts the focus from Dantean stars. Scève includes cosmic imagery in his last dizain with “le Ciel amplement long, et large” (D 449.8). Cavalcanti for his part writes in a passage on how the soul is moved by love, which perhaps inspired Dante; Cavalcanti’s verses remind one of Scève: Io veggio che negli occhi suoi risplende una vertù d’amor tanto gentile, ch’ogni dolce piacer vi si comprende; e move a loro un’anima sottile, rispetto della quale ogni altra è vile. (XXV, 11–15) (I see that in her eyes shines A strength of love so noble That every sweet pleasure is there perceived; And it directs toward them a delicate soul In comparison to which all others are base.)

Scève alludes to the limits of reason in the context of the highest things, which are found in love, and in Délie: Tout jugement de celle infinité, Où tout concept se trouve superflus, Et tout aigu de perspicuité Ne pourroyent joindre au sommet de son plus. (D 166.1–4)

According to this passage, intellect will not suffice to reach the elusive goal. This is comparable to Dante’s affirmation that reason is insufficient to complete his allegorical journey and to find truth. In another dizain, Scève writes of reason’s irrelevance at the sight of Délie: Mais quand ton front je revy pacifique, Sejour treshault de toute honnesteté, Où l’empire est du conseil arresté Mes songes alors je creus estre devins. (D 367, 2–6)

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The terms “songes” and “devins” (foretelling or revealing through insight) do not belong to the realm of reason: beyond reason lie dreams, visions, intuition, and passion. The perfection of Délie, like the perfection of Beatrice, inspires a response of adoration and wonder. The following dizain, structured to be a parody of a logical syllogism, exhorts one to admire and adore Délie’s perfection. The poetry is an articulation in words, not in a strictly analytical format, but employing allusion and figurative language: Mais si Raison par vraye congnoissance Admire en toy Graces du Ciel infuses: Et Graces sont de la Vertu puissance, Nous transformant plus, que mille Meduses: Et la Vertu par reigles non confuses Ne tend sinon à ce juste debvoir, Qui nous contraint, non seulement de veoir, Mais d’adorer toute parfection: Il faudra donc, que soubz le tien povoir Ce Monde voyse en admiration. (D 182)

Reason itself is subordinated to Délie; true knowledge and understanding lead to admiration of her. Délie manifests the divine graces, plausibly the three Graces who attend to Venus; the reference to Medusa is consistent with a mythological interpretation. Gérard Defaux writes of dizain 182: L’Amant se rend compte ici que la seule certitude rationnelle à laquelle il puisse aboutir est qu’il a raison d’aimer Délie. Impuissante à étouffer en lui la voix du désir, la raison est en revanche d’une efficacité parfaite quand il s’agit de justifier le culte qu’il voue à son idole. Conclusion évidente: si la raison veut se faire entendre, être écoutée, respectée, il faut qu’elle se mette au service de la passion.41

Reason in the service of passion: this conception undermines Defaux’s interpretation of Délie as a figure for Mary.42 Defaux writes, “Comme chez les troubadours, c’est chez Scève le feu de la passion amoureuse qui constitue la poésie dans son essence même.”43 Scève repeatedly expresses desire for Délie as a woman, wanting to be her lover. It is implausible to identify Délie with Mary when Scève writes: Mes songes lors je creus estre devins. Car en mon corps: mon Ame, tu revins,

41 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 182, p. 224. 42 Gérard Defaux, “(Re)visiting Délie: Maurice Scève and Marian Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 700. 43 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, p. 12.

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Sentant ses mains, mains celestement blanches, Avec leurs bras mortellement divins L’un coronner mon col, l’aultre mes hanches. (D 367.6–10)

This clearly refers to a sensual embrace, blended with spiritual terms: Ame, céleste, divin. It is an embrace involving body and soul. The soul is envisioned as being embodied and thus as possessing hands and arms capable of an embrace. Earlier in the dizain, the poet refers to the long month spent without Délie. The dizain evokes an imagined lover. In the sixth line, “songes” implies erotic dreams.44

44 This is Françoise Joukovsky’s reading of that line (see her edition of Délie, p. 349).

7 Scève and Petrarch: “Ardor fallace” Scève’s Délie has been called the first French canzoniere (for example, by Gérard Defaux and François Rigolot, among others),1 and critics identify Scève as one of the first major poets in France to manifest a Petrarchan influence. The present study nuances the classification of Délie within Petrarchan poetry of early modern France. First, a brief review of French and Italian Petrarchism provides context for literary reception.2 Then, Scève’s dizain sequence will be reviewed under the rubric of French Petrarchism. Petrarch’s love poetry stemmed from the courtly tradition and dolce stil novo, but it bore distinctions in relation to both movements.3 Some troubadour poets sought joi or jauzimen in fulfilment with the beloved, whereas stilnovo poets did not tend to do so in their verses. The medieval alba genre, the song of regret of lovers parting at dawn after a night of passion, is incompatible with Petrarch’s poetry about Laura, since Petrarch does not recount such an event. In the Triumphus cupidinis, Petrarch presents a procession of legendary and mythological lovers, but this is discrete from the poet-persona who loves Laura. We have seen that the male fin’amor poet sang to win his lady’s favors, to persuade her of his worth, and to confer glory on her and himself. The code of fin’amor emphasized the importance of the innamoramento and the eyes and sight of the beloved, meaning the poet’s gaze on the lady, a contemplation that inspired love, as well as the power of the lady’s gaze. The amor de lonh of Jaufre Rudel focused on amatory faith, memory, and the lady’s image in the poet’s mind. Some poets proclaimed that they were motivated by the god of love, a stilnovo topos; Petrarch does so in the incipit “In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona” (Toward where Love spurs me: Rvf 127). Others sang in lament (elegy or planh) to express their suffering caused by love unrequited or lost. The poet entered into a

1 See Defaux, ed., Délie, vol. 1, p. xi. See also François Rigolot, Poésie et Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 143. 2 For clarity, I use “Petrarchan” to denote direct borrowings from Petrarch, and “Petrarchist” to indicate broader participation in the tradition stemming from initial Italian imitators of Petrarch (e.g., Chariteo, Serafino, Tebaldeo, et al.), subsequently extending to other poets and vernacular languages. The terms Petrarchan/Petrarchist correspond to the Italian petrarchesco/petrarchista, and to the French pétrarquien/pétrarquiste. Bembo imitated Petrarch in his Rime (1530). Scève is a Petrarchist if we define the tradition of “Petrarchism” so broadly and superficially that it incorporates all manner of European love lyric from Poliziano to Shakespeare. Are Du Bellay and Ronsard Petrarchist poets? Is Spenser? It depends on the rubric’s definition and parameters. 3 See Leonard Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism, chap. 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-008

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relationship of loyal service in the courtly mode: to the lady, and sometimes to the god of love, as a vassal serves and obeys a feudal lord; this was depicted in the Roman de la rose when the god of love appeared to Amant as a grand seigneur.4 The lord of love appears in Dante’s dream vision early in the Vita nuova. Petrarch similarly refers to love as “mio signor” (Rvf 70.8). The courtly poet hoped to obtain from the lady merci (Occitan merce; Italian merzede, mercede; from the Latin merces, which presents monetary connotations), related to merci requested from God or the Virgin Mary in prayer, or mercy sought from a victorious enemy in war. The poet was subordinate to the lady according to the courtly code. The poet’s petition to grant his desire incorporated the vocabulary of prayer. Appealing to a lady for mercy, the poet sought a desired outcome using praise and flattery, while touting attributes of generosity, courtesy, and nobility of spirit. The relationship between poet and lady did not necessarily evolve or develop, for then the dynamic would be altered and a narrative would ensue. As Maurice Valency (1958) and Paolo Cherchi (1994), among others, have observed, the static, nonprogressive nature of the courtly relation between poet and lady allowed for infinite, cyclical variations on themes of longing, hoping, and despairing for love, like an endless refrain. Petrarch adopted this pattern in the Canzoniere. Petrarchism,5 meaning the composition of lyric poetry under Petrarch’s influence, usually sonnets, is generally understood in relation to the Canzoniere rather than encompassing the Triumphi, although the Triumphi were printed at least as often as the Canzoniere. In 1470, and in Bembo’s 1501 edition of Petrarch, the two works were printed together. Besides Renaissance poetry, the Triumphi influenced other arts such as painting and ballets de cour. Petrarchist poetry typically presented a sequence of short-form lyric love poems expressing praise and longing for an unattainable, idealized lady. Well-known topoi of Petrarchist verse include: –

– –

antitheses including fire/ice and sweetness/bitterness to convey the juxtaposition of the lover’s joy and suffering due to the lady’s unresponsiveness or inaccessibility internal conflict, doubt, and anxiety about whether the lady returned the poet’s sentiments wordplay and symbolism based on the lady’s name

4 Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel, part 1, lines 1878 sq. 5 E. H. Wilkins distinguished Petrarchism in the broadest sense from a more restricted Petrarchism, from the late fourteenth century until about 1600. See Wilkins, “A General Survey of Renaissance Petrarchism,” in Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch (1955), 280–81. Quoted in Stephen Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism (1980), 9.

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– – – –

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importance of the innamoramento, including the encounter’s time and place the poet’s love enduring through time apostrophes to the lady formulaic description and praise of the lady’s physical beauty and attributes (for example, blond hair, white skin, red lips, and pearly teeth)

Petrarchist poetry of the Renaissance may be identified by these characteristics, although they were also present in earlier courtly lyric and stilnovo poetry.6 Petrarch’s poetry in the Canzoniere and Triumphi became a vehicle for the transmission of certain medieval poetic practices in an elegant vernacular style. Dante’s poetry cast a shadow over Italian Petrarchism and over Petrarch’s own work, since many Petrarchan practices were found in Dante, Petrarch having been influenced by Dante. What then further identifies Petrarchism? An imitation of Petrarch’s language, style, and the poet’s conflicted emotions and passions, often illustrated through antithesis or oxymoron, contribute to the movement. Petrarch inspired poets in Europe to strive for elegance in their vernacular lyric, to approach classical ideals, and to abandon medieval forms. Other factors including the spread of printing, evolving literary modes, and appeal to readers impacted the dissemination and reception of Petrarch’s lyric love poetry. Petrarch and subsequent Petrarchist poetry participated in a Renaissance cult of beauty, particularly feminine beauty, giving rise to imitation, parody, and satire. This aesthetic sensibility expressed in literary forms had deep roots in the twelfth century and earlier (for example, classical Greek sculpture in antiquity, and its imitation in Roman copies). Prior to the growth of Ficinian Neoplatonism, Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio contributed to this cult of beauty.7 One example of this is Dante’s allusion in the Vita nuova 6.2 to his list (now lost) of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence. Notwithstanding Petrarch’s medieval roots, Petrarchism stemmed mainly from readings of Petrarch’s Italian poetry rather than from his poetic predecessors. Petrarchism was mediated by translations and imitations by other poets in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Features such as antithesis were more easily imitated and reproduced than others, and Petrarchism did not reproduce all salient aspects of Petrarch’s poetry. Associating one’s poetry with Petrarch through recognizable

6 Stephen Minta writes, “He [Petrarch] gave to the European tradition no new lyric forms. He was not even responsible for the invention of the ‘Petrarchan’ conceits which abound in literary histories,” Petrarch and Petrarchism, 2–3. 7 Boccaccio did so in the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (1341–1342) and the Amorosa visione (1342, second redaction between 1355 and 1360).

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references or techniques enhanced prestige, like a stamp of admission to participate in a tradition.8 For a few poets, Petrarch was another kind of resource as well. While he does not quite identify the je ne sais quoi of Petrarch’s appeal, Stephen Minta comments: The significance of Petrarch does not, then, lie in the area of themes and images. Indeed it is difficult to talk about his significance in a general way at all, though it is clear that he played a major part in the dissemination of the sonnet-form and of the lyrical sequence. . . for a host of minor poets, Petrarch acted as a model to be imitated and, for a few gifted poets, as a source of inspiration, an example of what could be achieved in the field of serious love poetry.9

The Latin title of Petrarch’s lyric collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which only later became known as the Canzoniere,10 reflected the fragmentary nature of the work, despite its coherence and unity as a carefully ordered sequence. It is rather problematic to call Délie a French canzoniere, because it was composed in dizains, not sonnets and canzoni; the name echoes the medieval Occitan chansonniers (in Occitan, cançonièrs) that antedate Dante and Petrarch. The title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta corresponds to the vernacular name Rime sparse (Scattered rhymes), whose words occur in the incipit, “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono” (Rvf 1.1). Petrarch’s lyric sequence was dear to him, since he continuously revised and reordered it from the 1330s until his death in 1374, yet officially he considered it of minor importance, Latin poetry being superior; it was a private, intimate work of vernacular lyric, not a public achievement for him. The collection presents a fictional chronology, for the ordering of the poems derives from artistic principles, rather than from the order of composition.11 Petrarch’s 366 lyric poems include 317 sonnets, and the rest are canzoni, ballads, and other lyric forms with varying structures.12 In Pétrarque et le pétrarquisme (1998), Jean-Luc Nardone writes: “Pétrarque est un homme nouveau. Premier poète lyrique, premier homme moderne, premier

8 See Stephen Minta, Love Poetry, 72. 9 Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism, 14. 10 The title Canzoniere was used to identify Petrarch’s Rvf from the late fifteenth century in Italy. In France, the work was known as Sonetti e canzoni, or Cose vulgari, following Bembo’s 1501 Aldine edition of Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi. See Emanuela Scarpa, “‘Canzoniere’: per la storia di un titolo,” in Studi di Filologia Italiana: Bollettino Annuale dell’Accademia della Crusca, 1997, 107–9. This point and the Scarpa article are cited by Alduy in “Scève et Pétrarque: ‘De mort à vie’,” 157, note 1. 11 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 10. 12 Poetic forms in the Canzoniere are as follows: 317 sonetti, twenty-nine canzoni, nine sestine, seven ballate, and four madrigali.

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humaniste . . . il bouleverse la conception de l’amour poétique . . . la belle aimée peut devenir plus réelle, plus humaine . . .”13 This view of Petrarch’s achievement is misleading, for Petrarch’s beloved was not more “real” or more “human” than female characters in other love poetry (conversely, Laura is arguably less real, in that she has virtually no discernible individual personality). Petrarch was hardly the first gifted lyric poet, as the following statement by Rinaldina Russell attests: “He employs traditional themes of love’s tyrannical domain, the lady’s superiority and remoteness, and the lover’s distressed state of mind.”14 This quote concerns not Petrarch, but Guido Guinizzelli. It illustrates the continuity between Petrarch and earlier lyric poets. Here is Guinizzelli’s use of antithesis: di ghiaccio in foco e d’ardente geloso; tanto m’angoscia ’l prefondo pensare che sembro vivo e morte v’ho nascoso.15 (From ice to fire and from burning to envy; Deep thought so torments me That I seem alive and conceal death.)

Guinizzelli uses tropes of fire and ice, as well as life-death motifs for love. Scève’s use of antithesis, like that of the troubadours, differs from Petrarch’s: in Petrarch’s poetry, there is “une contradiction apprivoisée, harmonisée, dissoute (selon les traces du dolce-amaro pétrarquien).”16 Scève’s contradictions coexist in tension. Robert Durling summarizes Petrarch’s relationship to the lyric tradition that precedes him: Petrarch’s themes are traditional, his treatment of them profoundly original. From Propertius, Ovid, the troubadors, the Roman de la rose, the Sicilians, the dolce stil novo, Dante, Cino da Pistoia there comes to him a repertory of situations, technical vocabulary, images, structures. Love at first sight, obsessive yearning and lovesickness, frustration, love as parallel to feudal service; the lady as ideally beautiful, ideally virtuous, miraculous, beloved in Heaven, and destined to early death; love as virtue, love as idolatry . . . the god of love with his arrows . . . Conceits, wit, urbane cleverness; disputations and scholastic precision; allegory, personification; wooing, exhortation, outcry; praise, blame; self-examination, self-accusation, self-defense; repentance and the farewell to love. These elements of the world of the Rime sparse all exist in the tradition.

13 Jean-Luc Nardone, Pétrarque et le pétrarquisme (Paris: PUF “Que sais-je?”, 1998), 21–22. 14 Rinaldina Russell, “Guinizzelli,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, 466. 15 Guinizzelli, sonnet 9, “Ch’ eo cor avresse, mi potea laudare,” trans. Robert Edwards. 16 See Risset, L’anagramme du désir, 64 and notes 66 and 67; Risset relies on Hans Staub, Le curieux désir (1967), Gianfranco Contini, Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca (1964, in his edition of the Canzoniere), etc.

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Petrarch’s originality lies in the intensity with which he develops and explores them, in the rich . . . synthesis of divergent poetic traditions, in the idea of the collection itself.17

These elements were deployed by Petrarchist poets and became topoi in Renaissance sonnets. Durling emphasizes Petrarch’s reading of Dante: the way Petrarch used the troubadour material was shaped by Dante’s example. Dante writes in the Vita nuova of how he strove to render a sonnet intensely moving for his readers: “acciò che più paresse pietoso, proposui di dire come se io avesse parlato a loro” (so that it would appear all the more moving, I resolved to write as if I had spoken to them: VN 40.5). This illustrates Horace’s principle in the Ars poetica of moving the reader.18 The goal of moving readers, a priority for Dante, is also evident in Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Stilnovo poets frequently attributed extravagant or divine qualities to the lady being praised. Laura goes to heaven after death, but she is not portrayed as ruling in heaven like the imperious divine figure of Beatrice. While Petrarch praises and idealizes Laura, she is not portrayed as a goddess like Délie or Beatrice. Cavalcanti’s poetry does not conform strictly to characteristics of the stilnovo movement; if the lady is virtuous, then she is unattainable, and the fulfilment of love is impossible (adynaton). The poet’s lament then is not about a lover involved in an intimate affair, but emanates from a distant admirer: this is Petrarch’s position. Concerning literary imitation, Petrarch cited Quintilian and Seneca in his Familiares letters on imitatio.19 He believed that writers should imitate more than one author, selecting here and there as bees gather pollen and transform it into honey (Seneca); that writers should disguise their models by altering the words used; and that imitation should be moderate, counterbalanced by originality; the writer should develop an individual style, with an ideal of similitudo rather than identitas, which would resemble the models too closely. Over many years, Petrarch revised and reordered his private sequence of vernacular love poems. Despite Petrarch’s ambivalence toward Dante, and despite his apparent intention to

17 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems 9. 18 Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BCE), Epistles 2.3, Epistula ad Pisones, known as Ars poetica. For Horace, poetry should captivate the reader, or audience (dulcia sunto, / et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto, lines 99–100), incorporate verisimilitude (proxima veris, 338), and benefit the reader through utility and delight (prodesse . . . delectare, 333–34). Classical rhetorical theory, including Cicero’s Orator, emphasized docere, delectare, and movere as purposes for discourse. Dante included Horace and Cicero in Limbo among the virtuous pagans (Inf. 4.89 and 4.141). 19 See Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 22–48.

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limit it,20 Dante’s influence has been discerned in Petrarch’s Italian poetry. In Cinquecento Italian literary debates, we saw that Bembo considered Petrarch’s poetry to be superior to Dante’s.21 In 1535, Ludovico Dolce, in the dedication to his Italian verse translation of Horace’s Ars poetica, berated ignorant poets for seeking to imitate Petrarch’s verse without sufficient study.22 Petrarch’s lyric poetry influenced several generations of Italian poets, including his contemporary and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), and later, Chariteo (the Catalan Benedetto Gareth, 1450–1514), Antonio Tebaldeo (1463–1537), Serafino Aquilano (1466–1500), Jacopo Sannazaro (1457–1530), Matteo Boiardo (1441–1494) in the Amorum libri, Pietro Bembo (1474–1547), Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), and Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492). A purist and reformer, Bembo considered the Petrarchist style of poets like Serafino to be ornate and affected.23 The poetry of Panfilo Sasso (1454–1527), Serafino, Chariteo, and Tebaldeo was suited for court entertainment.24 Conceits emphasized by Serafino, Chariteo, and Tebaldeo were adapted by writers in France and elsewhere. Followers of Bembist Petrarchism included Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), who was exiled from Florence and obtained patronage in France; Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533); Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564); and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), another Italian who spent time at the French court. Chariteo composed in Dantesque terza rima (as did Petrarch in the Triumphi). Serafino and others used the eight-line strambotto form in addition to sonnets. In the sequence of mostly sonnets, Endimione (1506), Chariteo praised a woman called Luna, which parallels the lunar symbolism of Délie. The lyric poetry of Bembo and Lorenzo de’ Medici is marked by their readings of Cavalcanti, Dante (notably the Vita nuova), and Petrarch. Bembo demonstrates this in his prosimetrum on love, the Asolani, and Lorenzo in his Rime and Comento ad alcuni dei suoi sonetti. In accordance with linguistic ambitions in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, Lorenzo further enhanced the prestige of the Italian language by assembling the first anthology of Italian verse, the Raccolta Aragonese. The Raccolta’s prefatory letter, and Comento prologue, justified Lorenzo’s use of the Tuscan vernacular for aesthetic reasons (in addition to

20 In his letter to Boccaccio (Fam. 21.15), Petrarch claimed not to have owned a copy of Dante in his youth, and that he did not read Dante to avoid his influence. 21 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua (1525), book 2, chap. 20. 22 Dolce is quoted in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1, 102 and note 71. 23 See “Serafino Aquilano,” in Peter Bondanella et al., eds., Dictionary of Italian Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 538–39. 24 Forster, The Icy Fire, 26.

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political strategy). Lorenzo wrote Italian poetry in a broad variety of genres; poems such as sonnet 65 of his Rime25 exude a sensuality that contradicted Petrarch’s pudore in his own poetry. The activity of Lorenzo’s Florentine circle confirms that Dante’s work was still being read alongside Petrarch’s. Besides Petrarchism, Neoplatonism developed in Italy under the influence of Ficino, and was discernible in the subsequent work of Bembo and Castiglione. Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais popularized the sonnet form in France. Marot and others prior to Scève brought greater awareness of Petrarch’s writings to the court of François I.26 By this time, Ficinian Neoplatonism began to influence lyric poetry along with Petrarchism in France. Along with the new intellectual currents, Marot contributed to interest in the Roman de la rose: in 1526, he published a verse adaptation. He probably wrote the first sonnet in French. Petrarch’s use of antithesis in articulating love for Laura finds a precedent in an extensive passage of the Roman de la rose, at the beginning of Jean de Meun’s part, in which love is defined and described. The passage contains a continuous series of antitheses that fill 66 lines (4290–4355).27 The Roman de la rose was one of the most frequently copied texts of its kind in the Middle Ages, and was read by both Dante and Petrarch. In La philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin, A.-J. Festugière acknowledges the lineage of love lyric, both French and Italian currents, stretching from the troubadours to Renaissance poets, which blends with Neoplatonism in the wake of Ficino: À vrai dire, cette poésie amoureuse n’a pas subi l’influence que de la seule philosophie platonicienne. La conception de la femme qu’on y trouve, l’état d’infériorité de l’amant à l’égard de sa Dame, les circonstances de leur amour, le language qu’ils emploient, la subtilité des métaphores, la préciosité du style, tout cela vient de Pétrarque ainsi que des Strambottistes italiens et, par eux, des troubadours et des trouvères du Moyen Age. Il reste beaucoup de traits de l’amour courtois chez les poètes comme dans les petits traités amoureux et les romans du seizième siècle. Au surplus, ce n’est pas seulement grâce à Pétrarque et aux Italiens que la théorie de l’amour courtois est encore goûtée en France, à cette époque. On n’y avait point cessé de lire le Roman de la Rose . . .28

25 The sensuality in Lorenzo’s sonnet 65 is qualified as “inconcevable chez Pétrarque” by Jean-Luc Nardone in Pétrarque et le pétrarquisme, 37. 26 See Jean Balsamo, “François I, Marot et les origines du pétrarquisme français (1533–1539),” in Les poètes francais de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, 35–51. 27 Raison speaks in a lengthy didactic discourse to the lover, for nearly 3000 verses. 28 Festugière, La philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin, 2.

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While the use of antithesis in love lyric was a topos in antiquity (for example, Catullus’s Odi et amo), the continued interest in the Roman de la rose confirms the resilience of such topoi. A few years after the publication of Délie, Sébillet notes Scève’s use of the dizain in his 1548 treatise Art poëtique françois, prior to Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549). Sébillet writes: “Le dizain est l’épigramme aujourd’hui estimé premier, et de plus grande perfection.”29 Some of Scève’s dizains, like the sonnets of Petrarch, Ronsard, and others, were set to music. Five years after the publication of Scève’s Délie, Du Bellay’s Olive (1549) and Pontus de Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses (1549) appeared, early French canzonieri composed in sonnets. A sonnet from the Erreurs amoureuses contains a Dantesque passage: “Mon esprit, las d’estre en prison mortelle, / Cherche aux Enfers, en Terre et Ciel, secours” (I, 48, 7–8). Although Pontus de Tyard’s poems are sonnets, the lines are decasyllables like Scève’s dizains, making the short-form poems of the Erreurs a cross between those of Petrarch and Scève: the poems blend formal characteristics of Petrarch’s sonnets and Scève’s dizains.30 Other sonnets of Pontus de Tyard are in alexandrine verse. Olivier Millet has catalogued the poems of Petrarch that Du Bellay imitated directly in his Olive sonnets.31 Petrarchism abounds in Pléiade poetry, including Ronsard’s copious sonnet collections. Du Bellay wrote his poem of 248 lines “À une Dame” (“Contre les Petrarquistes”)32 not in sonnets but in a traditional French form, in reaction against the mode. This satirical poem is a splendid example of anti-Petrarchism. Du Bellay denounces the Petrarchist idiom, alluding to heaven and hell as clichés to illustrate the joy and suffering of love: Mais cet enfer de vaines passions, Ce paradis de belles fictions, Deguisement de noz affections, Ce sont peintures vaines. (lines 73–76)

29 Sébillet, Art poëtique françois, part 2, chap. 1, in Traités de poétique, 104–5. 30 Jacqueline Risset remarks that “Pontus de Tyard a distendu en sonnets l’étoffe compacte des dizains, sa langue n’est pas traveillée mais ornée; du ton de l’affirmation il retourne–ou régresse–à la plainte pétrarquiste,” L’anagramme du désir, 66. 31 See Olivier Millet, “Du Bellay et Pétrarque, autour de l’Olive,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, 253–66. At the end of his essay, Millet lists each incipit of Petrarch with the corresponding sonnet from the Olive, thirty-five in all. 32 Joachim Du Bellay, “A une Dame,” Recueil de Poesie (1553), XVIII, in Œuvres complètes, vol. III (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), 257–63. Citations are from this edition.

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Du Bellay implies that love-passion is vain, as Petrarch had indicated, but rather than drawing moral condemnation, it leads to futility. Joy and suffering expressed in Petrarchist poetry are fraught with delusions. In scathing opposition to conventional notions of virtue and courtly devotion, Du Bellay writes: “Le plus subtil, qu’en amour je poursuis, / S’appelle jouyssance” (lines 135–36). This statement is consistent with Amant’s expressed intent in the second part of the Roman de la rose. Du Bellay also asserts the French origins of Petrarch’s love poetry with a nationalistic bent: Noz bons ayeux, qui cest art demenoient, Pour en causer, Petrarque n’apprenoient, Ains franchement leur Dame entretenoient Sans fard ou couverture. Mais aussi tost qu’Amour s’est fait sçavant, Lui qui estoit François au paravant, Est devenu menteur et decevant, Et de Thusque nature. (lines 153–60)

Du Bellay implies that Petrarch appropriated his art from poetic ancestors of French regions: are they Occitan troubadours, who are not exactly “François,” whom Petrarch touts in the Triumphi? the authors of the Roman de la rose? medieval poets composing in ancien français? trouvères? In the 1549 Deffence, Du Bellay does not think highly of medieval French lyric, and he composed and augmented the Olive sonnets in imitation of Petrarch; evidently his views evolved.33 Du Bellay indicates that Petrarch’s poetry contained artifice that was absent from French poets; by developing such artifice, Petrarch deviated from his models. Thus, he reasons, the ostensible fawning and deceptive qualities of Petrarch’s verses were not native to Avignon and the Vaucluse, but to Tuscany. Du Bellay seems to be exasperated by “foreign” influence contaminating the development of French poetic prestige, as poets veer toward preciosity (for example, “mignardant,” line 143). Du Bellay’s poem against the Petrarchists seems to illuminate his disdainful reading of Délie, in references, for instance, to the Caucase (line 93) as a hostile, uncivilized place, and to Prométhée (line 108), whom Petrarch does not name, whereas Scève alluded to him in dizain 77. The last line reads “la plus belle Idée” (208), which could refer to the anagram of Délie as l’idée. Finally, “de

33 While Du Bellay composed mainly in moyen français and Latin, he would have encountered local dialects in travel and via neighboring regions, and Occitan in Poitiers where he had studied law, as well as reading allusions to troubadour verse. Patriotic sentiment tends to exalt mythologized origins.

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Thusque nature” echoes “ce Thuscan Apollo” (D 417.6). This presents a parody of Scève’s reference to Petrarch. Nonetheless, Du Bellay and other Pléiade poets considered the Canzoniere a worthwhile model for the composition of vernacular love poetry. Their Petrarchan imitations are more overt than those of Scève in Délie. Unlike Scève, Du Bellay and Ronsard plundered the Canzoniere for themes, figures of speech, and other rhetorical resources.34 Du Bellay never wholeheartedly endorsed Délie as a serious French poetic model in the Deffence, nor in his satirical poem against Petrarchists, where Scève was relegated to les pétrarquisants. Petrarch’s canzone Rvf 70 pays homage to poets at the end of each stanza, including the troubadour Arnaut Daniel (with a canso line quoted in Occitan that Petrarch attributed to him), whom Dante had admired and quoted in Occitan (Purg. 26.140–47); Cavalcanti; Dante; and Cino da Pistoia. Guinizzelli is not included in Rvf 70. For the last quote at the end of Rvf 70, which happens to be the incipit of Rvf 23, Petrarch cites himself as the culmination of the lineage.35 In the Triumphus cupidinis (IV, 32–57), Petrarch catalogues esteemed love poets: Dante, Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d’Arezzo, the two Guidos (Cavalcanti and Guinizzelli), the Sicilians, Jaufre Rudel, Arnaut Daniel, and other troubadours. This encomium reveals evidence of the roots of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry and his participation in the lineage. In Rvf 287, Petrarch mentions Guittone, Dante, and Cino as being in the third sphere (that of the planet Venus, the heavenly domain for the souls of love poets). Guittone renounces courtly love and amatory lyric, and embraces Christian devotion; Guittone also expresses disdain for the common people.36 Petrarch’s preoccupation with amatory poetry is confirmed by the four Triumphi chapters on love, out of twelve: more than chapters on fame, time, eternity, death, and chastity. Petrarch spent many years in Provence, in Avignon (1326–1337) and the Vaucluse (1337–1353). Scholars of Petrarch have written on the fin’amor background in his poetry. Examples of Petrarch’s use of courtly themes and vocabulary (for example, onestate and cortesia) occur in Rvf 23, among others, where the poet imagines the virtuous Laura in heaven: . . . lei che ’l ciel onora, ov’alberga onestate et cortesia, et dov’io prego che ’l mio albergo sia. (Rvf 37.111–12)

34 Terence Cave, “Maurice Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 116. 35 This structure is not original: Peire d’Alvernha’s sirventes, “Cantarai d’aqestz trobadors,” devoted a stanza to each of twelve troubadours, commenting in a lively tone mostly on their flaws; the poem culminates with himself as “majestres es de totz” (stanza 14). 36 E.g., Guittone d’Arezzo, “Gente noiosa e villana . . .” (vile and annoying people: canzone XV, incipit).

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(her whom Heaven honors, in whom virtue and courtesy dwell, and where I pray that I may dwell.)

In the congedo, the poet tells his canzone to convey the message to his lady without touching her hand, and he will go quickly to her: Non la toccar, ma reverente ai piedi [i.e., non toccare la mano della donna] le di’ ch’ io sarò là tosto ch’io possa. (Rvf 37.118–19) (Do not touch it, but reverently at her feet tell her that I shall be there as soon as I can).

Although he addresses his poem as “canzone” (song, a musical sound), the image is a textual one: the poem is written on a sheet the lady holds in her hand to read; the poet instructs it to stay at her feet instead, as if even her hand were too intimate a contact to touch indirectly. The poet himself would not dare touch her hand (an instance of Petrarch’s rhetorical pudore). The means of transmission has shifted from troubadour song to reading a text, albeit aloud, and thus cantare and canzone become figures of speech echoing an earlier musical tradition. Relying on courtly tradition, Petrarch developed a different “conception de l’amour poétique,” as Nardone puts it.37 The Triumphi were written in terza rima, and Laura in the Triumphus eternitatis (the sixth and last Triumph) is closer to Dante’s divine figure of Beatrice than to Laura in the Canzoniere: E tra l’altre leggiadre e pellegrine beatissima lei che Morte occise assai di qua dal natural confine! (TE 85–87) (. . .) se fu beato chi la vide in terra, or che fia dunque a rivederla in cielo! (TE 144–45) (And among all the rare and beauteous ones Most blessed she, who long before she came To the bound that nature sets was slain by death. [. . .] If he was blest who saw her here on earth, What then will it be to see her again in heaven!)38

Petrarch anticipates great pleasure from a past glimpse or detail, a topos from earlier poets. The Triumphus eternitatis concludes with a vision of Laura in heaven, reunited with the poet. Petrarch does not recount an encounter with

37 Nardone, Pétrarque et le pétrarquisme, 21. 38 Trans. E. H. Wilkins.

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Laura, but evokes a future hope, whereas in the Commedia Dante recounts meeting Beatrice (Purg. 30), who conducts the pilgrim to Paradise. Petrarch observed the changeable nature of fortune, of people’s taste and preferences over time (Familiares 10.5).39 Roles, types, and exempla transcended individual persons. In Petrarch’s lyric poetry, forms and figures of language are often conventional. The cycle follows the liturgical year, with important dates carefully arranged; fragments are gathered together, whence emerges the persona (Latin for “mask”). The persona of the present moment is contrasted with the persona of the past, evoked in the opening poem: “quand’ era in parte altr’ uom da quel ch’ i’ sono” (when I was in part another man from what I am now: Rvf 1.4). Petrarch’s amatory collection explores the passage of time and quest for eternity. Timothy Reiss (2003) remarks that Petrarch, unlike Dante, never achieves a sense of eternity: “He never does so because of his overwhelming sense, constantly repeated, of being materially caught, in life, in a material body.”40 Earthly love marks the soul’s bodily imprisonment, “la pregion terrestra” (the earthly prison: Rvf 86.4).41 Laura thus prevents Petrarch from approaching the divine, instead of drawing him to it, as Beatrice does for Dante, and as Délie does for Scève. For this reason, Petrarch renounces Laura in Rvf 366, and attempts to shift his unrequited devotion to the Virgin Mary instead. It is a profoundly religious event, akin to conversion in Rvf 366. Rvf 1 and 366, the first and last poems, reduce and circumscribe the poet’s love for Laura, from an overwhelming experience of unrequited passion and impossible desire, to a sin and error. Petrarch remarks in Familiares 22.10 that those who love are deceived easily and eagerly.42 For Petrarch, Laura belongs to the category of the forbidden as defined by the church, representing what he should not do but still does, after Augustine (in the Confessions, for example, books 2 and 6), and Paul (in Romans 7:15). Petrarch’s Canzoniere illustrates the contemptus mundi topos (in Rvf 1, with scorn for the common people; and elsewhere, denial of physical, sensual love), a departure from the courtly code of love that subverted ecclesiastical views on women, sex, and marriage. Ultimately, both Dante in the Vita nuova and Scève adhere to the courtly code more than Petrarch does. They go beyond it in their conceptions of love, rather than rejecting it. Unlike Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch cannot find a way to synthesize Christian doctrine with desire for his beloved; hence his guilt and ultimate penitence.

39 Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, 306. 40 Reiss, Mirages, 346. 41 Reiss, Mirages, 346. Petrarch’s Rvf 81 and 86 allude to suffering due to imprisonment in the earthly body. 42 “[Q]ui amant non facile modo, sed cupide falli solent” (Fam. 22.10).

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The prologue of Rvf 1 is also an epilogue, as the collection comes full circle with themes of regret and memory. Dante’s literary persona does not regret loving Beatrice; instead, his love is refined and purified in order to be worthy. To reconcile this with the condemnation of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5 for fulfilling their lustful desire, Dante’s condemnation is presented in an ambiguous manner: they are in a shallow circle, and Dante is sympathetic to their plight. Dante implies that while the couple did not go about loving in the right way, the poet is not condemning love and desire altogether, since that would implicate his own poetry, including the Vita nuova, and would contravene the macrocosmic amore framing the Commedia. Dante judges the desire of Paolo and Francesca to be a perversion of love, as Virgil explains in Purgatorio 17.85 sq.43 In the condemnation in Inferno 5, Dante reacts against Guido Guinizzelli’s ethics as espoused in his poem “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (To the noble heart love always repairs),44 which Francesca uses (with distortions) to justify her behavior with Paolo, and for which she is condemned with him in the circle of the lustful. Dante demonstrates that stages of development exist in love, and he fulfilled the intent expressed in VN 42 when his persona vowed to find the best way to love Beatrice, and the best way to write about her (a troubadour topos).45 The love poets who appear in Purgatory are not condemned eternally, but pass through the fire to be purged and transformed, just as Dante’s poetic persona is purged, to be reunited later with Beatrice. While the literary characters Francesca and Paolo are condemned, the poet who created them is not: the pilgrim is purified with other poets in Purgatory, and is destined to attain Paradise. For Petrarch’s poetic persona there is no Purgatory for his love of Laura. It is condemned in absolute terms, as if he, Francesco, were Francesca but had not consummated his forbidden desire. In the Confessions, Augustine condemned lust in the wake of long experience. Petrarch adheres to Augustinian views concerning the power and deception of images of desire, and the instability of human nature: thus his poetic persona wanders in the labyrinth of his own illusions.46 Robert Durling comments: “In [Petrarch’s] view sexuality is not a source of integration but 43 Virginia Jewiss, “The Lustful,” in the Dante Encyclopedia, 577. 44 See, e.g., Rinaldina Russell, “Guido Guinizzelli,” in the Dante Encyclopedia, 466. 45 Dante writes: “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 potessi più degnamente trattare di lei” (After this sonnet there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me resolve to write no more of this blessed one until I could more worthily treat of her: VN 42.1). For the troubadour topos of finding an adequate way to praise the lady, see Frede Jensen, ed. and trans., The Poetry of the Sicilian School (New York: Garland, 1986), p. xlv). 46 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 20–21.

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of disorder, and the Augustinian answer to it is denial.”47 Petrarch most likely took vows in the lower orders. Petrarch’s brother Gherardo became a Carthusian monk in 1342. Petrarch never married, and the Canzoniere does not deal with adulterous love, unlike courtly lyric (the poet-lady relation typically being adulterous by definition). In the Canzoniere, the poet’s love for the lady is forbidden for moral reasons in a Christian context, which motivates the conflicted poetic sentiments that Petrarch develops to great effect. Other barriers to union with the beloved are the poet’s unrequited love, and the lady’s death, perhaps due to the Black Death that struck in 1348 (if Laura existed).48 Laura is chaste, and the relation between Petrarch and Laura is restricted to absence and longing, with the lady’s image remaining in the poet’s mind, and Love as intercessor. The Canzoniere reveals the stamp of Dante’s Vita nuova. Petrarch’s poetic output in sonnets was abundant, but Laura was more an ideal than a flesh-and-blood woman with feelings (despite Nardone’s claim). We never know Laura, only a mysterious lady bearing that name with whom Petrarch’s poetic persona is in love. In Dante’s Vita nuova there are screen ladies49 and Love, but Dante does not have rivals for the attention of Beatrice. Since Dante relates that some time later gossip arises about one screen lady, and Beatrice publicly withholds her greeting from him, the pretext of screen ladies must have been a successful ruse indeed. The subsequent marriage and children of the historical Dante did not seem to perturb the author as he professed love for Beatrice in his writing.50 Petrarch does not have rivals for Laura,

47 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 20–21. 48 Tradition recounts that Laure de Noves of Avignon was married to Hugues/Hugo de Sade in 1325 at age fifteen, and two years later Petrarch saw her on 6 April 1327. Perhaps this is Petrarch’s Laura, but it is speculation. There is no mention in Petrarch’s writings that Laura was married, or factual details about her life. Robert Durling reviews the limited evidence, including Petrarch’s 1338 letter to Giacomo Colonna, in his introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 4–7. 49 In the VN, Dante the character/narrator paid attention to other ladies in order to disguise his love for Beatrice; these ladies served as a “screen” for the true object of his love. 50 We cannot infer that one’s biography corresponds to literary writings, but writers are human beings who navigate social contexts, and when there is extant evidence beyond texts, it may enhance our understanding of the author’s thought. Morality tends to be conflated with cultural norms, whose ideals do not always reflect human behavior in practice, including for those who profess doctrine but whose private actions may be inconsistent with its intent. Any avowed Christian, after the example of Jesus, ought to be aware of the importance of treating people with decency and compassion, including women (God’s creatures according to biblical creation narrative). One recalls Augustine who, for the sake of his professional ambitions, including the prospect of an advantageous marriage and his mother Monica’s concern about scandal, dismissed his Carthaginian concubine to return to Africa without their son after she had spent fifteen years with him (Confessions 4.25). Augustine expressed no concern for her

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except for the poem where the poet conquers the rival sun (Rvf 115); otherwise, Laura rebuffs the poet. The entire relation unfolds in the poet’s mind and memory, inscribed in the text. In contrast, Scève has a rival who excites his jealousy, Délie’s husband (D 161). This courtly dynamic of the adulterous love triangle is not present in the Canzoniere, and union of Petrarch and Laura does not occur under the auspices of love. The importance of the gaze in the innamoramento is salient to a Christian perspective: the gaze leads to temptations to be avoided diligently by monks. The Rule of St. Augustine (ca. 397),51 one of the oldest rules extant, set forth principles governing western Christian monastic life. Chapter 4 of the Rule of St. Augustine, “Safeguarding chastity and fraternal correction,” advocates thus: 4. Although your eyes may chance to rest upon some woman or other, you must not fix your gaze upon any woman. Seeing women when you go out is not forbidden, but it is sinful to desire them or to wish them to desire you, for it is not by tough or passionate feeling alone but by one’s gaze also that lustful desires mutually arise. And do not say that your hearts are pure if there is immodesty of the eye, because the unchaste eye carries the message of an impure heart. And when such hearts disclose their unchaste desires in a mutual gaze, even without saying a word, then it is that chastity suddenly goes out of their life, even though their bodies remain unsullied by unchaste acts. 5. And whoever fixes his gaze upon a woman and likes to have hers fixed upon him must not suppose that others do not see what he is doing. He is very much seen, even by those he thinks do not see him. But suppose all this escapes the notice of man—what will he do about God who sees from on high and from whom nothing is hidden? Or are we to imagine that he does not see because he sees with a patience as great as his wisdom? Let the religious man then have such fear of God that he will not want to be an occasion of sinful pleasure to a woman. Ever mindful that God sees all things, let him not desire to look at a woman lustfully. For it is on this point that fear of the Lord is recommended, where it is written: An abomination to the Lord is he who fixes his gaze. (Proverbs 27:20)

situation, only for his own lust (he promptly replaced the concubine), which in retrospect he condemned as sinful. Petrarch articulated misogynistic views in De vita solitaria 2.3 that are consistent with Jerome in Against Jovinian (393), I, 47. Boccaccio’s views on women were evidently complex and inconsistent, and undermined by irony and satire; misogynistic invective in the Corbaccio did not necessarily reflect the author’s views, and diverged from other Boccaccian writings. Boccaccio writes that women bring consolation and torment, and at the end of his chapter on Prometheus in Genealogia deorum gentilium 4.44, he quotes Petrarch’s De vita solitaria 2.3.3 at length against women, stating that women’s eyes cause destruction with a basilisk’s power. Scève uses the basilisk topos in D 1. The topos conveys the perceived lethal power of women. 51 See The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions, trans. Raymond Canning (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1996).

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These admonitions address the same subject of later fin’amor and Petrarchan love poems focusing on looks passed between prospective lovers, whereas the Rule forbids monks to gaze upon women or to meet their gaze. Women are believed to be sinful and dangerous because of the sexual temptation they represent for monks, and women are believed to be morally weaker than men. Desire is viewed as impure and leading to sin, the moral basis of Petrarch’s dissidio. This passage contains the essence of the anguished repression and guilt underlying the tensions in the Canzoniere concerning Petrarch’s love for Laura. Petrarch sired children, and like Augustine, he was not celibate all his life, though the ascetic ideal of celibacy was consistent with his religious sensibility. As a learned cleric, Andreas Capellanus would have been familiar with the Rule when he composed his De arte honeste amandi (Art of Courtly Love), writing a lengthy description of what happened when a man saw a woman and began to desire her in his heart.52 These views concerning women and lust are part of the fonds commun of traditional Western misogyny and antipathy to sensual pleasure promulgated by ecclesiastical authorities, which evidently did not suffice to impose consistent celibacy within the church’s own ranks. Petrarch the clerico fights passionate love, but his persona never manages to accommodate and sublimate it, whereas Dante apparently succeeds in doing so. In Purgatorio 27, Dante the pilgrim, terrified, hesitates to enter the fire on the seventh terrace where lust is purged. Virgil encourages him with an irresistible inducement: if he overcomes his fear, he will reach Beatrice. Once Dante is in the fire, Virgil cheers him onward: “Li occhi suoi già veder parmi” (already I seem to see her eyes: Purg. 27.54). In the crucial moment, the beloved lady’s eyes motivate Dante forward through the fire. Beyond this stage, Dante reaches the earthly paradise and meets Beatrice. There is precedent in Dante’s earlier lyric for the importance of the lady’s eyes and gaze, notably in the canzone “Io sento sí d’Amor la gran possanza” (How much do I feel Love’s great influence). Dante writes: “se di buon voler nasce merzede, / io l’addimando per aver più vita / da li occhi che nel lor bello splendore / portan conforto ovunque io sento amore” (if mercy from good will is born, I ask for it, so that I still may have more life from those sweet eyes that, dazzling bright, bring solace everywhere I feel love’s might: 38.13–16).53 We have seen that for Scève the gaze is central to the love experience.

52 The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J. J. Parry, 28–29. Passage quoted in Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 18. 53 Trans. Joseph Tusiani.

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McFarlane states that Scève could not avoid writing in a Petrarchan mode, a mode that had become fashionable in Italy from the early sixteenth century, and became popular in Lyon.54 Many of Scève’s neo-Latin colleagues introduced Petrarchan themes into their volumes of verse published from 1533 to 1538.55 McFarlane sums up Scève’s “undisputed” borrowings from Petrarch, an important Italian poet for Scève, as “discreet and effective; they link Délie with the tradition,” and the number of “undoubted textual reminiscences” is modest.56 According to McFarlane, Joseph Vianey and Parturier had overstated the case for Petrarch’s influence on Scève in Délie. He rightly points out that we must distinguish between the fonds commun and clear-cut borrowings for which precise sources can be cited.57 The reference to Petrarch is clear from Délie’s opening and closing dizains, but the imitation is never slavish or extensive; instead, such framing indicates that Scève is participating in an established lyric tradition. McFarlane emphasizes balance in “the measure of Scève’s dependence on, and independence from, the Petrarchan tradition,” and observes, “Scève at no time borrows wholesale from Petrarch.”58 McFarlane’s critical assessment of the Canzoniere’s influence on Délie differs from that of JoAnn DellaNeva in Song and Counter-Song: Scève’s ‘Délie’ and Petrarch’s ‘Rime’ (1983), a reading of Scève’s Délie as noncomic parody (from the Greek parodia, “a song sung beside”) with respect to Petrarch’s Canzoniere. DellaNeva defines noncomic parody in the wake of Russian Formalist theory: “such a work conforms to its formal features, but subverts its codes, deviates from its norms and disrupts its vraisemblance.”59 Since then, DellaNeva has written articles along similar lines about Scève,60 and about imitative practices of other Renaissance poets. No scholar before DellaNeva had done a booklength study of the role of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in Délie. It was acknowledged and summarized in articles or brief sections, for example, by Terence Cave, François Rigolot, Doranne Fenoaltea, and Cécile Alduy.61 The purpose of my discussion of DellaNeva’s book here is to distinguish my views from hers, and

54 McFarlane, Délie, 23–24. 55 McFarlane, Délie, 24. 56 McFarlane, Délie, 26. 57 McFarlane, Délie, 25. 58 McFarlane, Délie, 36 and 37. 59 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 12. 60 E.g., “The S(c)evered Intertext: Playfully Imitating Petrarch in the Délie,” Romance Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 195–203. 61 The matter was synthesized by Cécile Alduy in “Scève et Pétrarque: ‘De mort à vie,’” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, 157–70.

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to develop a comparative analysis of the poetry of Scève and Petrarch for the reassessment of Délie as a Petrarchan work. Referring to the introduction to McFarlane’s 1966 critical edition of Délie, DellaNeva writes: “McFarlane thus restored [Petrarch’s] Rime to its rightful place as the chief source of Sceve’s poetry and relegated borrowings from the Petrarchist poets to a role of relatively minor importance.”62 Yet McFarlane writes that the borrowing must be reduced to its proper proportions (in this he revises the views of Parturier and Vianey),63 stating that Scève borrows primarily from Petrarch rather than from Italian Petrarchists like Serafino. This is the context for the statement, “Petrarch is, in Scève’s eyes, the major Italian poet.”64 McFarlane writes of Scève’s “comparative lack of dependence,”65 and suggests, referring to Saulnier, that we speak of Scève’s Italianism in Délie.66 DellaNeva emphasizes Scève’s imitation in Song and Counter-Song, referring to Petrarch as his “poetic master”67 and writing, “Scève displays his deference towards his master while demonstrating the differences between them.”68 The Rime (or Canzoniere) becomes a “sacred text”69 with which Scève engages in “scriptural exegesis.”70 I respectfully disagree with DellaNeva’s interpretation of the nature of Scève’s poetic relation to Petrarch, which diverges from McFarlane’s position. However, DellaNeva later modified her “sacred text” statement ten years later in a 1993 article about Scève and Petrarch, noting: “Clearly Scève, like Ronsard, did not view his Italian precursor’s text as a sacred entity to be handled reverently; rather, he appears to take Petrarch at his word, treating the Italian’s text as a collection of ‘fragments’” (my emphasis).71

62 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 13. 63 See McFarlane, Délie, 23 and 28. 64 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 26. 65 McFarlane, Délie, 28. 66 McFarlane, Délie, 28, note 2. See also Saulnier, Maurice Scève, vol. 1, 204–9. 67 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 14 et passim. 68 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 32. Based on her footnote 16 (Song and Counter-Song, chap. 2, p. 34), DellaNeva seems to have borrowed the deference/difference idea from ClaudeGilbert Dubois, whom she cites concerning Telemachus, a literary character (Odysseus’s son) in the Odyssey (not an author imitating another author). Dubois writes of Telemachus as an archetypal imitator, “[une] imitation déférente, bien que différentielle,” in his article, “Imitation différentielle et poétique maniériste,” in Revue de Littérature Comparée, 51 (1977): 44. A deferential tone toward Petrarch in Scève’s Délie is a dubious proposition. Scève alludes to him, but without overt praise: what the text says about Petrarch is relatively little. 69 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 30 and 49. 70 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 30. 71 DellaNeva, “The S(c)evered Intertext,” 199.

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Concerning a dizain containing an allusion to Petrarch, DellaNeva says in Song and Counter-Song, “D 417, however, develops a different theme that is, in fact, inspired by a difference source.”72 Dorothy Coleman considered Petrarch even less relevant for Délie than did McFarlane; she was mainly concerned with Scève’s reception of ancient Roman poets.73 DellaNeva writes, “This rehabilitation of Petrarch as the master to whom Scève turned for material is evident in the work of Dorothy Coleman, who identified new Petrarchan sources in Délie and, what is more, analyzed their function within the imitative poem.”74 However, Coleman argues that Scève diverges from the dolcezza of Petrarch and the Italian Petrarchists and instead chooses to be dur in his poetry.75 Coleman writes, “Sensual satisfaction (excluded by both Petrarch and the Petrarchists almost by definition) is not excluded in Scève. . . . The duality of Délie’s nature—chaste and carnal at the same time—is the basis of the cycle’s structure and the themes that Scève is exploiting branch out from this central position.”76 Coleman notes that there is no human encounter between the poet and Laura,77 and that “Religious images are going to be inherent in Petrarch’s canzoniere whereas they are not in Scève or Propertius and the moral evaluation of Petrarch’s experience in love is totally different from the other two poets.”78 DellaNeva does not address this distinction in moral positions between Petrarch and Scève. DellaNeva analyzes Scève’s imitation of Petrarch in dizain 388, asserting that Scève’s use of the adjective amer in referring to Petrarch points to “the lover’s severe moral stance and to his unripe age, [which] thus shows that he is aware of the fact that youth and sinful behavior are closely associated from the start of the Rime.”79 Petrarch’s first and last poems of the Canzoniere evoke the topos of youth and foolish behavior. Scève understood Petrarch’s linking of youth and sinful actions in Rvf 1. Scève chose not to duplicate this with his own poetic persona in Délie, although he refers to Petrarch’s in dizain 388: Ce doulx venin, qui de tes yeulx distille, M’amollit plus en ma virilité,

72 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 34. 73 Coleman, in Maurice Scève, Poet of Love: Tradition and Originality (1975), An Illustrated Love ‘Canzoniere’: The Délie of Maurice Scève (1981), and articles. 74 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 14. 75 Coleman, Poet of Love, 50. 76 Coleman, Poet of Love, 28. 77 Coleman, Poet of Love, 29–30. 78 Coleman, Poet of Love, 30, note 1. 79 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 29.

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Que ne feit onc au Printemps inutile Ce jeune Archier guidé d’agilité. Donc ce Thuscan pour vaine utilité Trouve le goust de son Laurier amer: Car de jeunesse il aprint à l’aymer. Et en Automne Amour, ce Dieu volage, Quand me voulois de la raison armer, A prevalu contre sens, et contre aage. (D 388)

While Scève finds himself in the dilemma of being torn by conflict between reason and passion, as DellaNeva rightly states, Scève’s position is not that of Petrarch: unlike Petrarch’s persona with Laura, Scève’s persona is not burdened by guilt and the pervasive sense that his erotic desire for Délie is morally forbidden, even as the poet is intimidated by Délie’s vertu. The word amer, alluding to Petrarch, has a different connotation from the laurel’s bitterness for Petrarch’s own verse; dizain 388 transmits no sense of sinfulness associated with Scève’s love, however bitter the outcome might be. In dizain 388, Scève differentiates his own case from Petrarch’s: Petrarch finds his unrequited love bitter later in life, having fallen in love while young; by contrast, Scève falls in love later in life (ostensibly at age thirty-six) against sens, raison, and aage. Dizain 388 refers to the first dizain in the sequence: the jeunes erreurs of dizain 1.1 occur prior to meeting Délie, whereas Petrarch’s primo giovenile errore in Rvf 1.3 refers to falling in love with Laura, leading to shame and regret. It is uncertain whether Laura was married, yet DellaNeva writes of Laura as “a married and, therefore, inaccessible woman.”80 It is possible to misread Scève’s text, as Parturier was judged to have done concerning intertexts with Petrarch or Petrarchist poets; such intertexts do not appear in the majority of Scève’s dizains. DellaNeva nuances her reading of Délie: “Délie participates in many traditions at once, and no single interpretation can pretend to do justice to the complexities of this work.”81 Nonetheless, she dismisses earlier critics such as Saulnier, Weber, Parturier, and Vianey based on the “methodological weaknesses of their arguments.”82 Yet Saulnier’s scholarship on Scève, for instance, constitutes a great contribution.

80 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 29. 81 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 14. 82 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 13.

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Let us compare salient features of the two poetic texts in question:

Rerum vulgarium fragmenta • • • • • • •

Délie

366 poems in Tuscan (Italian) 317 endecasyllabic sonnets the rest in lyric forms (canzoni, etc.) no illustrations or emblems work’s title refers to poems as fragments time structured with liturgical calendar traditional division in vita/in morte di Laura no reference to Laura’s marriage renunciation in last poem Laura (symbolism: laurels, laudation, poetic glory, immortality, mythical Daphne)

• • • • • • •

450 poems in French 449 decasyllabic dizains plus one huitain fifty emblems with mottoes work’s title refers to beloved allusions to phases of the moon Délie does not die

• • •

• •

sun symbolism love for Laura unrequited

• •

• • • • •

not directly Neoplatonic inspired prolific imitation trobar ric contains courtly topoi influence of Dante

• • • • •

Délie marries affirmation of love Délie (symbolism: triple moon goddess, praise, poetic glory, immortality, Neoplatonic sense, anagram of l’idée, play on délier, Delia) moon symbolism union occurs between poet-lover and Délie Neoplatonic not widely imitated, though influential trobar clus contains courtly topoi influence of Dante

• • •

If these may be considered the characteristics of each work, then Délie does not appear to conform consistently to the main formal features of the Canzoniere. One significant difference in form between the two texts concerns Scève’s choice to use the epigrammatic dizain rather than the sonnet, with the dizain forming the dense, tight unit of a 10 x 10 structure for each poem. Scève did not intersperse chansons, rondeaux, or other lyric forms with the dizains, nor did he reproduce Petrarch’s number of poems or the liturgical year. Délie’s name is derived primarily from the mythological rather than the botanical, unlike the Olive, in which Du Bellay adopts the olivier instead of the Petrarchan laurel, as an alternate symbol of glory from antiquity.83 In summary, with some general features of the Petrarchan idiom not necessarily original to Petrarch, we can

83 Minta, Love Poetry, 46.

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fairly call Délie Petrarchan as a long sequence of short love poems to an inaccessible lady, with development of the poet’s interiority, antithesis, and a few textual borrowings and references in proportion to the total number of poems in the sequence. Durling surmises that the Canzoniere is not mainly about Laura: its central theme is the psychology of the lover.84 DellaNeva asserts that Rvf 1, 264, and 366 provide structural pillars for Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the confessional aspect of the work.85 In comparing the structure of Scève’s Délie to it, she alludes to dizains 1 and 449. But Délie is not penitential, nor does it seem to contain a Christian conversion. Dizains 1 and 449 contain allusions to Petrarch and thus frame the collection, but there are no pillars of a genre different from the dizains interspersed for structure, as Rvf 264, 366, and other canzoni may function as structural pillars in the Canzoniere. Rvf 1 is a sonnet, so it does not belong in the same category of poetic genre as the canzoni. Ernest Hatch Wilkins noted that, prior to Petrarch, it was customary to keep lyric genres separate (for example, canzoni, ballate, etc.) in the Occitan and Italian manuscripts. From Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch derived the idea to place canzoni as structural nodes or pillars at varying intervals among the short poems.86 The structural symmetry of the Canzoniere recalls the Vita nuova. Scève’s Délie is a canzoniere (chansonnier) only insofar as it constitutes a vernacular collection of short-form love poems (but not sonnets). Scève does not use other poetic forms in his collection, whether French, Occitan, or Italian, besides the single huitain, a minor departure. Beyond the broad conception of genre as lyric sequence, similarities between Délie and the Canzoniere tend to appear in individual poems, rather than throughout the entire sequence: for example, dizains 235–36 in relation to Rvf 126 “Chiare fresche et dolci acque” (Clear, fresh, and sweet waters), or the sonnet Rvf 35 “Solo et pensoso” (Alone and filled with care) in relation to dizains 224 and 226.87 Textual reminiscences recall more than one source: the Diana and Actaeon myth, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 3), known to Dante, Petrarch, and Scève, presents the scene of Diana bathing in the spring waters. Scève’s use of liqueurs (“L’image d’elle en vos liqueurs profondes,” D 235.8)

84 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 7. 85 Song and Counter-Song, 89 sq. 86 Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 11. 87 JoAnn DellaNeva has explicated the intertextuality of these poems in “Image and (Un)likeness: Mirroring Other Texts in Scève’s Délie,” in A Scève Celebration, 43 sq., for D 235–36 and Rvf 35; and “The S(c)evered Intertext: Playfully Imitating Petrarch in the Délie” (1993), 195 sq., for D 225–26 and Rvf 126.

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recalls the Latin “liquido” of the Ovidian passage,88 rather than Petrarch’s language. Scève’s “ondes” (D 235.10) recalls Ovid’s “unda.”89 Scève evokes the charms of Délie’s body, including her “seinz precieux” (D 236.7), as Petrarch with Laura in Rvf 126, “angelico seno” (angelic breast, line 9). DellaNeva rightly points out Petrarch’s use of “angelico” with a religious connotation that counters the sensuality.90 This is an intertext, although the sensuality of Scève’s language is a significant departure from Petrarch’s text: “angelico seno” and “seinz precieux” represent very different evocations of the poet-lover’s interest in the lady’s body, in that Petrarch elides sensual desire, rendering “angelico” rather ironic since the focus on an eroticized body part does not truly stem from intrinsic interest in praising resemblance to androgynous or asexual angels, but instead juxtaposes sacred and profane vocabulary. I find that Scève’s use of religious vocabulary (such as ciel, divin, sacré, adorer, and so forth) is not Petrarchan. 91 In contrast to Petrarch’s Rvf 366 to the Virgin Mary, Scève does not repent or express fear of theological damnation for idolatrous, obsessive, sensual love. Some of Scève’s spiritual vocabulary may be linguistically similar to Petrarch’s, but the meaning takes shape in a different moral context, and is not devotional in tone or purpose. DellaNeva claims that Scève “follows Petrarch’s initiative” in being “tempted by the sin of idolatry,”92 but Scève’s idolatry is not presented as sinful. Scève idolizes and adores Délie, as he announces at the outset of his dizain sequence. He writes, “Je preferoys à tous Dieux ma Maistresse / Ainsi qu’Amour le m’avoit commandé” (D 16.1–2). There is no indication that it is sinful for him, as it is for Petrarch; this is a courtly love declaration, not a pious vow of caritas, and could be interpreted in a blasphemous or mythological vein. Scève does not follow Petrarch’s initiative in this regard; he diverges from Petrarch significantly. Petrarch’s use of religious imagery in his love poetry, even interspersed with mythological imagery, conforms to a Christian worldview, whereas Scève’s does not: it could be idolatrous or blasphemous to equate Délie with a moon-goddess, to

88 “Hic dea silvarum venatu fessa solebat / virgineos artus liquido perfundere rore” (Met. 3. 163–64). 89 Ovid, Met. 3.200, the moment when Actaeon sees the image of himself with horns reflected in the water: “Ut vero vultus et cornua vidit in unda.” 90 DellaNeva, “Image and (Un)Likeness,” 48. 91 DellaNeva writes, “The nexus of religious vocabulary in R 126 . . . finds a counterpart in D 235–36 . . . without always resorting to exact translation.” See “Image and (Un) Likeness,” 49. 92 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 83.

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“adore” her both spiritually and sensually, as when the poet writes of her as “Constituée Idole de ma vie” (D 1.10). Coleman comments on Petrarch’s love: “There is an awareness that love is sinful: to record one’s errore is therefore to take a Christian attitude to love which is totally different from that of either Propertius or Scève.”93 Coleman adds, “We can see how completely Scève departs from Petrarch in his treatment of the fragile relationship between two people in love. Quite apart from the way Scève expresses the experience, the orientation and attitude are totally different from Petrarch.”94 Concerning Petrarch’s use of “morte” and “morti,” there is no erotic aspect, whereas for Scève les mortz bear erotic connotations. DellaNeva writes, “Scève began . . . to write a sequence of love poems that would outshine the work of the French master of the age [Marot] by reverting to the even greater authority of the Italian poet.”95 But if Marot had already translated some of Petrarch’s sonnets, then why would Scève diverge from the literary mode of writing sonnets, if he wished only to ride Petrarch’s coattails to poetic fame in France, as it were? The French poet who trod that imitative path was Du Bellay in his youth with the sonnet sequence Olive (1549). Scève apparently lived and wrote quietly; he did not ambitiously or self-consciously pursue poetic glory as did Petrarch or Ronsard. Scève expressed the intent for his poetry and love for Délie to endure through time (D 449), the link between poetry and immortality being a topos stemming from Greek antiquity. Scève used Petrarch as a point of departure, engaged in dialogue with his poetry, and composed a substantially different oeuvre. DellaNeva states that readers of Délie recognized the dizain sequence as a “rewriting of the Rime,”96 created in response to it; yet Délie also “participates in many traditions at once.”97 There is imitatio, translatio, inventio, and reconfigurations of topoi in the text. There is also much material in Délie that is not in the Canzoniere or Triumphi. DellaNeva identifies the Canzoniere as an “encyclopedic text.”98 Petrarch identified his poems as rime sparse (Rvf 1.1) or rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragmentary and scattered. The word encyclopedia (from Greek enkuklios + paideia) literally means “teaching around” something, or a circle of instruction. Early modern encyclopedism signified ways of assembling and organizing knowledge, and connecting its parts in a coherent manner. Petrarch’s sequence is an ambitious, rich poetic

93 94 95 96 97 98

Coleman, Poet of Love, 29. Coleman, Poet of Love, 30. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 18. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 19. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 14. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 22.

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text, a source of extraordinary style, language, and topoi for love poetry, but its purpose and genre diverge from an encyclopedia.99 Dante’s Commedia qualifies as encyclopedic in terms of its vast medieval knowledge and ordered coherence. In any case, the term would be anachronistic when applied to Petrarch or Dante: the term encyclopaedia was coined by fifteenth-century humanists who misread the texts of Pliny and Quintilian.100 Corresponding medieval parallels would be the florilegium, summa, or speculum (such as the mid-thirteenth-century Speculum maius of Vincent de Beauvais).101 DellaNeva claims that Scève’s allusion in dizain 388 to Petrarch as love poet “differs considerably” from the allusions of earlier rhétoriqueur poets like Marot or Jean Lemaire de Belges.102 Here are the relevant lines: Donc ce Thuscan pour vaine utilité Trouve le goust de son Laurier amer: Car de jeunesse il aprint à l’aymer. (D 388.5–7)

This passage contains an allusion and remark concerning Petrarch, but not praise of him. In contrast, Jean Lemaire’s line reads, “bon Petrarcque, en amours le vray maistre.”103 It is Jean Lemaire who openly calls Petrarch “master,” not the discreet Scève. By comparing allusions of rhétoriqueur poets to “the mention of Homer’s name by medieval poets who never read his work,”104 DellaNeva implies, following Stephen Minta,105 that they might not have read Petrarch’s poetry. While this is possible for minor poets, it is implausible for Marot. Marot spoke Occitan in childhood, translated Latin into French, spent time in Italy under various circumstances, and encountered Italianate culture in Lyon.106 DellaNeva concludes that until 99 For an overview of medieval and early modern classifications for poetry, see Jean Lecointe, “La poésie parmi les arts au XVIe siècle en France” (chap. 3), in Poétiques de la Renaissance, ed. Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 53–71. Concerning the classification of poetics among the sciences, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), vol. 1, chap. 1, pp. 1–37. 100 William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 101 Michel Beaujour, among others, has commented on the medieval speculum as an encyclopedic genre, and of the Speculum maius. See Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, rhétorique de l’autoportrait (1980), 30–35. 102 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 26. 103 Jean Lemaire de Belges, from Temple de Vénus, line 6. Quoted in Joukovsky’s edition of Délie, note to D 388, p. 357. 104 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 26. 105 Minta, Love Poetry, 72–76. 106 Clément Marot encountered languages all his life: in 1506, at age ten, he had to shift from langue d’oc (his langue maternelle) to langue d’oïl when his father Jean de Marot moved to the

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the time that Scève composed his poetry, previous references, including those of Marot, invoked Petrarch as “an authoritative representative of tradition and not as a unique poetic personality.”107 However, the French poet who first translated a few of Petrarch’s sonnets, and who spent time in exile at the court of Ferrara in 1535–1536, was Marot. We have no definitive evidence that Scève traveled to Italy or lived there, though both Marot and Scève evidently were perfectly capable of reading and understanding Petrarch’s vernacular lyric in the original Tuscan (Italian).108 In a footnote citing Minta, Franco Simone, Mia Cocco, and C. A. Mayer, DellaNeva acknowledges the lack of scholarly consensus for her position concerning Marot: “The question of Marot’s use of the Petrarchist idiom in his own poetry remains a thorny one.”109 This contextualizes her statement (supra) in Song and Counter-Song. Dorothy Coleman observes that Scève’s adaptation of classical themes is closer to Marot in the 1530s than to the “showy experimentation with tradition” of the Pléiade poets, but that Scève “differs from Marot in the durs aspects of his poetic technique.”110 A fair assessment incorporates medieval, Renaissance, French, Italian, and classical sources of poetic influence for Marot and Scève: this includes Occitan poets, Dante, Petrarch, and the Roman de la rose, among others. Marot and Scève were composing poetry well before 1549, the year of Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration, which influenced their reputations, and long before Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (1560–1621). By 1549, with the rise of the Pléiade poets, sonnets were being composed in French lyric, and literary tastes were shifting. If Scève had a poetic model, it could be his contemporary Marot, whom he met in Lyon when Marot associated with the sodalitium lugdunense in 1538, if not earlier. Scève made

French court. Clément Marot was interested in grammar, and detested pedantry. He translated Vergil, Lucian, Ovid, and at least six sonnets of Petrarch into French. Marot died in Turin in 1544. See Clément Marot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2007–2009), vol. 1, p. 6. 107 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 26. 108 A French translation by Vasquier Philieul of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was not printed until 1548. Concerning Marot’s Chant des visions de Pétrarque, Jean Balsamo writes: “Il offrait, pour la première fois, une traduction qui voulait être littérale et complète. La version témoignait d’une parfaite compréhension du texte italien et il semble peu probable que le poème français eût été composé à partir d’une traduction antérieure due à un autre que Marot, tant il rend compte de l’original, en termes poétiques. . . L’initiative du travail revenait toujours au roi, qui en avait donné l’ordre au poète.” See Balsamo, “Marot et les origines du pétrarquisme (1530–1540),” in Clément Marot, “prince des poëtes françois,” 1496–1996, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Champion, 1997), 326. 109 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 26, note 4. 110 Coleman, Poet of Love, 53.

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the aesthetic and formal choice of dizains for his sequence, rather than sonnets. Marot contributed significantly to the development of French Petrarchism. Both Marot and Petrarch, for different reasons, influenced Scève’s poetics. DellaNeva implies that Scève draws upon a single text, that of Petrarch,111 and that his Canzoniere was of predominant importance for Délie. In a psychoanalytical interpretation of the Scève-Petrarch relation, embedded in a discussion of dizain 417 and Rvf 208, she writes: The Frenchman reverently describes his literary master as the incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry himself, and solemnly proclaims the immortality of his love story. But this apparent deference merely masks a more profound desire to overthrow the previous literary dynasty and to subvert all that it has created. In this situation, the filial relationship between master and imitator has gone awry; in its most extreme form, the hostility of the emulating poet manifests itself as an uncontrollable urge to annihilate his model, to kill the literary father with whom he vies for the love of the same muse.112

Here is the dizain in question: Fleuve rongeant pour t’attiltrer le nom De la roideur en ton cours dangereuse, Mainte Riviere augmentant ton renom, Te fait courir mainte rive amoureuse, Baingnant les piedz de celle terre heureuse Où ce Thuscan Apollo sa jeunesse Si bien forma, qu’à jamais sa vieillesse Verdoyerea à toute eternité: Et où Amour ma premiere liesse A desrobée à immortalité. (D 417)

Petrarch establishes himself as an avatar of Apollo and poet laureate. Scève identifies Petrarch in this way because Petrarch presents this identity in the Canzoniere, and it is recognizable to readers of Petrarch. Terence Cave notes that when “Scève, in the last two lines [of D 417], sets his own love next to Petrarch’s, he makes no reference to his poetic powers, and I do not believe any is implied: indeed, his rejection of such an obvious opportunity should, I think, be taken as significant.”113 This illustrates Scève’s discretion and subtlety. Scève’s reverence is lavished on the river Rhône, which the poem apostrophizes. “Liesse” (joie) in line 9 echoes “liesse” in D 413.6. Translatio occurs with displacement from Avignon to Lyon, which the Rhône also courses

111 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 22. 112 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 37. 113 Cave, “Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 118.

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through, joining the Saône in Lyon. The passion of the flowing waters symbolizes the passion of the poet’s love; the dizain, like dizain 413, has an erotic subtext, as DellaNeva points out, following Risset.114 Cosmological references are common to Scève, Dante, and Petrarch. Let us revisit this passage in Délie: Quand Titan a sué le long du jour, Courant au sein de sa vielle amoureuse, Et Cynthia vient faire icy sejour Pour donner lieu la nuict tenebreuse. (D 356.1–4)115

“Titan” has been interpreted to mean both Tithonus and Titan,116 both of whom are associated in different ways with the cyclical change between night and day. According to DellaNeva,117 either interpretation is plausible, whereas only one is logically possible. Concerning Scève’s “Titan” as Tithonus, which DellaNeva discusses in Song and Counter-Song, the myth of Aurora and Tithonus is used in a strange way to evoke a lunar dawn. Cynthia is the moon, and when she emerges, the reunion of the mythical lovers represents the cosmic transition from day to night: the liminal moment of sunset and moonrise occurs at dusk. DellaNeva cites a passage from the Commedia to compare with dizain 356. To indicate the hour, Dante alludes to what DellaNeva considers to be a lunar dawn, following Grandgent et al., in an equally baffling passage that opens Purgatorio 9: La concubina di Titone antico già s’imbiancava al balco d’orïente, fuor de le braccia del suo dolce amico. (Purg. 9.1–3) (The concubine of ancient Tithonus was already turning white on the eastern balcony, having left the arms of her sweet lover.)

114 Jacqueline Risset, Anagramme du désir, 41. 115 The Aurora-Tithonus myth, as interpreted in D 356 and in Dante’s Purg. 9.1–3, is discussed in DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 62. DellaNeva bases her argument on Grandgent for the obscure Dante passage evoking a lunar dawn. In Purgatory, where Dante-pilgrim was located, it was about 8:45 pm, while in Italy it was 5 am at that moment. 116 In the notes to D 356, p. 1, Parturier identified Scève’s “Titan” as Tithonus, emphasizing the literary vogue for referring to the change from night to day as Aurora leaving her mortal companion’s bed. McFarlane corrected this, claiming a conflation of two deities named Titan, and interpreted Scève’s Titan as the more ancient god Titan, whose consort is Terra. DellaNeva indicates that both are possible, but if Scève’s reference is to Titan and not Tithonus, then the Dantean passage she quotes from Purgatorio 9 is unrelated to it. 117 See DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 60–63.

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Petrarch for his part also mentions Tithonus: “O felice Titòn, tu sai ben l’ora / da ricovrare il tuo caro tesoro” (O happy Tithonus, well you know the hour / when you will recover your dear treasure: Rvf 291.5–6). Petrarch designates Aurora in the Canzoniere as an epithet for Laura, and he puns on her name l’Aurora/Laura ora in the same sonnet, Rvf 291, lines 1 and 4.118 The rhétoriqueur poets commonly referred to the sun as “Titan,” following Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, and this makes the most sense for the “Titan” passage in dizain 356; “sa vielle amoureuse” is Titan’s consort, the sea, into which the sun plunges at the end of the day: vielle could mean “she loved him long.”119 DellaNeva relied on Grandgent’s edition of Dante’s Commedia, whose interpretation followed that of E. Moore (1887). Charles Singleton presented the arguments for both sides of the Aurora debate in his Purgatorio commentary (1973).120 Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition of Dante’s Commedia121 mentions the alternate interpretation of the lunar dawn (“l’aurora lunare”). But considering the way Dante used mythological references, and he would not have diverged from Vergil’s version of Aurora, the lunar dawn version is discounted as “non ammissibile.”122 There was biblical precedent in the way Dante used concubina for Aurora as wife (uxor), not mistress, in the sense of compagna di letto. Therefore, while Dante, Petrarch, and Scève all participated in the broader tradition of referring to mythical deities in a cosmic context, the comparison of “Aurora and Tithonus” (with Titan as the sun) from dizain 356 with the Dantean passage and with the Petrarchan sonnet, while understandable, is implausible. Titan would not then constitute an “inversion” of Petrarch’s sun imagery in this case, since in dizain 356 Titan signifies the sun, not the moon. Petrarch’s reference might have been inspired by Dante’s passage, since both poets clearly refer to the myth of Aurora and Tithonus. In dizain 356, as in 355, Scève refers both to dawn and to dusk, and in dizain 356 to the sun and the moon. This is no longer a matter of inversion of Petrarchan imagery. While Scève’s poetry alludes to Petrarch in dizains 388 and 417, it does so through antonomasia rather than direct naming: for example, “ce Thuscan Apollo” does not necessarily mean Scève was a devoted adherent of Petrarchism, and perhaps Scève wanted to surpass Petrarch’s legacy. Cécile Alduy has described the “l’écart fondamental” within a spectrum “de l’identification à la différentiation”: Scève distinguishes himself from his predecessor “tout en s’assurant un statut

118 See notes to Rvf 291 in Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata, 1155–56. 119 See note to D 356 in Joukovsky, Délie (1996), which builds on McFarlane’s notes (1966). 120 See Singleton, Purgatorio 9 in vol. 2, Commentary, 175 sq. 121 Dante’s Commedia, 3 vols., ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1997), Purgatorio 9, 285, note to lines 1–9. 122 Vergil, Aeneid 4, vv. 584–85 and 9, vv. 459–60; Georgics I, v. 447.

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d’égal et de compétiteur.”123 This is congruent with Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic rivalry in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which DellaNeva mentions in Song and Counter-Song.124 Bloom’s sources include Longinus’s literary treatise known as On the Sublime. Concerning Scève’s final dizain in Délie, 449, DellaNeva states: “Scève sees no need to transcend his desires, to transform his passion into a mystical experience which will lead to eternal salvation; instead, he is content to achieve worldly fame and enjoy earthly pleasures until the end of time.”125 Yet even death will not separate the lovers, according to Scève. In my view, Scève’s poetry points to a mystical love experience, without denial or repression of erotic aspects; the love does not conform to a strictly Christian definition, whereas Petrarch’s evocation of the love experience is not mystical, nor is his renunciation and ultimate petition to the Virgin Mary to grant him salvation. As Reiss has stated, Petrarch’s persona is imprisoned in the material body with respect to earthly love. Petrarch does not succeed in transcending his desire for Laura, nor does he transform his love for her into a mystical or spiritual experience that will lead to eternal salvation. He believes his love for Laura prevents him from attaining eternal salvation. Dante transfigures his passion for Beatrice and has a mystical experience culminating in silence in Paradiso 33. Dante writes of luce etterna and vivo lume, akin to Scève’s flamme si saincte en son cler, symbolizing divine love that humans can attain, for Dante and Scève each bear witness to it. Scève’s persona seeks not only worldly fame and earthly pleasures. He does not denounce the physical, sensual, human aspects of love, and thus the love both transcends and manifests in the passion of desire, with exaltation and plunge to the depths. Concerning Scevian love, Hunkeler notes that the body cannot be excluded from the spirit; both must be considered.126 Immortality is divine, and the love evoked in Scève’s hermetic poetry was not only about the pleasure and anguish of love. Dante and Scève did not renounce or regret their love, because its path led to divine love; Dante perceived divine attributes in Beatrice, and Scève perceived them in Délie; these attributes were not ornamental. This is where Petrarch diverges significantly; he would not equate ardeur and vertu concerning love (D 449), as does Dante. Ardeur does not signify Christian piety or religious zeal. In Paradiso 33, Dante uses amatory vocabulary of human love, such as l’ardor del desiderio, il dolce, and amor (Par. 33, lines 48, 63, and 145, in the final line in the Commedia).

123 Alduy, “Scève et Pétrarque: De mort à vie,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, 158. 124 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 14. 125 DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 97. 126 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 135.

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In the conclusion of Song and Counter-Song, DellaNeva notes that structural differences in the lyric collections of Petrarch and Scève are significant: “the fixity of the Délie . . . serves to contrast with the fluidity of Petrarch’s poetic sequence.”127 She finds that Scève “refuses to accept the organizing principles, thematic developments and stylistic features so clearly defined in the Petrarchan prototype. Scève’s deviations from Petrarch’s lyric sequence may be based on the “strikingly different world views embraced by Petrarch and Scève.”128 This structural difference between the two texts becomes “inversion” and “counter-genre,” to account for the strong connection between them.129 The governing premise from the beginning of Song and Counter-Song that Délie allegedly conforms to the Canzoniere’s “formal features” seems to differ from these statements. DellaNeva’s 1983 book has been analyzed here for two main reasons. My case for Dante’s poetry as an important part of the literary background for Scève’s Délie must take into account the place of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in Délie, for which DellaNeva’s is the only book-length study on the matter. Dante is Petrarch’s major poetic predecessor. The second reason is that her book is cited frequently: any post-1983 discussion of Scève and Petrarch perforce refers to this work, including all recent critical editions of Délie. In his 2004 edition of Délie, Defaux classifies her work together with that of the travaux fondateurs of Scève criticism: Rigolot, Cave, Fenoaltea, Donaldson-Evans, and Skenazi.130 Therefore, Song and Counter-Song covers a major subject in Scève criticism. The book analyzes a dizain sequence composed in the 1530s and 1540s, when the doctrine of imitatio dominated poetry.

Délie as un-Petrarchan Let us consider an alternate perspective on Délie as un-Petrarchan. Joseph Pivato considered Délie “un-Petrarchan” and hermetic. Pivato traces Délie’s designation as a Petrarchan text back to Vianey (1909) and Parturier (1916). Pivato situates Délie within the hermetic tradition that transcended regional borders, and compares Scève’s use of “dur” (as in durs Epygrammes) with Quintilian’s “aspera et dura” and Dante’s “aspr’ e sottile.” Pivato disagrees with McFarlane, who denies that Scève followed an “aristocratic hermeticism,” as did other neo-Latin poets of

127 128 129 130

DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 101. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song, 101. DellaNeva, Song and Counter-Song: “inversion” (59), “counter-genre” (85, 102 et passim). See Defaux, Délie, vol. 1, p. xxxix and note 39.

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his time.131 Pivato writes: “Notwithstanding Parturier who tends to regard Délie as Sceve’s attempt to reproduce the Canzoniere in French, it is apparent that the Lyonnais poet is not blindly imitating the Petrarchan models. Scève is aware of the traditions he is using and combining, and he consciously modifies them to his own artistic purposes.”132 The incomplete, disjointed quality of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, announced in the title, corresponds to the poet’s fluctuating sentiments toward Laura, in contrast to the elegance of his poetic style. This smooth, polished style is not imitated by Scève. In Ars poetica, Horace wrote: “Brevis esse laboro / obscurus fio” (I labor to be concise, I become obscure: lines 25–26).133 This reflects Scève’s practice in the condensed, epigrammatic dizain form. Where Petrarch’s style was smooth and polished (trobar ric), Scève wove together condensed ideas and imagery. Within such a close-knit structure, Scève’s images revolved around the rhetoric of thought and argument; they contrasted with Petrarch’s rhetoric of style, which was meant to please the reader.134

131 McFarlane, Délie, 1. Quoted in Pivato, “Maurice Scève’s Délie: Unpetrarchan and Hermetic,” Studi Francesi 79 (1983), 17. 132 Pivato, 17. 133 Quoted in Dorothy Coleman, Poet of Love, 12–13. 134 Pivato, “Maurice Scève’s Délie: Unpetrarchan and Hermetic,” 19.

8 Scève and Petrarch: “Constituée idole de ma vie” In the first sonnet of the Canzoniere, Petrarch announces his intentions for the collection. Petrarch edited and carefully organized his poems over many years, and the sequence does not follow the order of composition.1 The first sonnet contains a penitential soliloquy,2 a reflection developed only after much time has passed: Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand’ era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’ i’ sono, del vario stile in ch’ io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno. (Rvf 1) (You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now: for the varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow, where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon. But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within; and of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases the world is a brief dream.)

Petrarch expresses the hope of receiving pity and forgiveness (from the reader, from God, and perhaps from himself). This rhetorical stance announces the

1 Wilkins established an order of composition for Petrarch’s poems; see The Making of the Canzoniere (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951). Contini, Petrucci, and others have studied Petrarch’s revision and ordering of his lyric collection. Santagata, Wayne Storey, and Arnaldo Soldani refined Wilkins’s work on Petrarch’s composition. 2 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 115. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-009

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poet-persona’s intention to persuade the reader that his love has involved great suffering that merits attention, pity, and pardon as for one who has sinned, in the Christian confessional context in which Petrarch places his love for Laura. The pietà and perdono sought from readers (Rvf 1.8) diverge from traditional merce/mercede that the troubadours would seek from the beloved lady: any sympathy solicited would reflect troubadour love-suffering, not Christian sin that denounces the lover’s objective. Petrarch does not seek pity and forgiveness from Laura herself, according to Rvf 1: the exchange is not between poet and lady, nor is it addressed to the reader about the lady. Instead, the poet seeks a certain response from his reader about his own past, which has partly transformed him (line 4). The sonnet frames this desired response, and in subsequent poems the poet evokes his conflicted love for the lady in eloquent language. The words core, errore, dolore, and amore (lines 2, 3, 6, and 7) rhyme and fit together conceptually in the Petrarchan schema. If they were arranged in a circle, the logic would reflect the cyclical movement of the entire poetic sequence: love is ignited in the poet’s heart; he errs, straying from the path; he suffers, but the unrequited love remains; he renounces his love; and the cycle begins anew. No progression, amorous relation, or ultimate union with the beloved is envisaged, only the poetic production that generates the cycle. Involvement and fulfilment do not figure in narrative development. The repeated use of the adjective “vane” (line 6), along with the verb “vaneggiare” (line 12), as well as “vergogno” emphasizes the poet’s guilt, shame, and sense of transgression, which ends in futility. We know Laura only through her evocation in the poems, not as a biographical or historical figure. The name Laura, symbolizing the poet’s quest for fame, functions like an Occitan senhal to disguise the lady’s true identity (if she is not invented). The shame resulting from that love exists in the poems. Petrarch echoes Dante and, indirectly, troubadour lyric via Dante’s Occitan verses spoken by Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio 26, when Arnaut says: “Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; / consiros vei la passada folor” (Purg. 26.142–43: I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way; I see with grief past follies).3 This corresponds to Petrarch’s “piango et ragiono”

3 Cristoforo Landino’s commentary claims that Arnaut speaks a blend of French and Catalan; see Comento sopra la Comedia, II, 1436. Robert Hollander (2000–2007: commentary to Purg. 26. 140–47 at the Dante Dartmouth Project, dante.dartmouth.edu) has pointed out that Nathaniel Smith (1980) showed that Dante’s Occitan words spoken by Arnaut in Purgatorio 26 contain echoes from other poets. Hollander notes that Dante has Arnaut speak clearly and openly, in contrast to the inaccessible trobar clus Arnaut practised in his own poetry. Arnaut’s line, “sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!” (Purg. 26.147) reflects Cino da Pistoia’s poem 64, verse 7, “sovverrebbe a voi del mio dolore” (Mario Marti, ed., Poeti del “Dolce Stil Nuovo,” Florence: Le Monnier, 1969,

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(Rvf 1.5) and his “primo giovenile errore” (Rvf 1.3), or past folly.4 Arnaut and Petrarch appeal for sympathy and remembrance, as inscribed in the respective texts. Petrarch’s persona struggled with his love for Laura and thirst for glory, which are linked metonymically through the wordplay of Laura-lauro in the Canzoniere. Petrarch attains renown, but at the expense of love: he loses the lady, but wins the laurel,5 as Apollo loses Daphne but wins the laurel in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1. Petrarch’s renown in his lifetime was not for the Canzoniere. In the Secretum dialogue, which takes place between Augustinus (representing Petrarch’s favorite author) and Franciscus (Petrarch), the author’s guilt emerges: despite Augustinus’s disapproval, Franciscus has been unable to renounce his love for Laura. The love portrayed in Petrarch’s Canzoniere is cast within a moral context of transgression and sin: the poet loves, although the love is both forbidden and unrequited. He persists, although he must give up loving Laura and instead focus on devotion to God and his salvation. Petrarch, like Dante, is trying to find his way out of a “dark wood” of past errors, as we see in Rvf 1 (“primo giovenile errore,” line 3).6 Dante writes in the opening canto of the Inferno, “la verace via abbandonai” (I abandoned the true path: Inf. 1.12), implying a moral crisis, perhaps stemming in part from his youthful “errors” recounted in the Vita nuova (for example, his behavior with Beatrice, screen ladies, and the donna gentile). Petrarch indicates that he abandoned the true path, and strayed by loving Laura to excess. Dante uses the word “errore” several times in each canticle of the Commedia, to signify wandering and lack of understanding; these definitions are related, for they spring from the Latin verb errare. Dante writes, “io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori” (I recognized my not false errors: Purg. 15.117), and includes an antithesis about visions showing true things, yet in error in that the content of the visions is imagined, rather than apprehended through the senses. Concerning Petrarch’s use of errore, Terence Cave states, “Petrarch uses the opening poem of his cycle to denounce the moral vanity of love in terms that color the whole spiritual odyssey charted by the Canzoniere.”7 We have seen that such

p. 574). Hollander cites Giacalone’s comment that Arnaut had written concealing verses, and now in Purgatory the Occitan poet conceals himself in the penitential flames. Petrarch produces his own version of poetry and sorrow, analogous to Arnaut’s, in Rvf 1. 4 Elsewhere in the Canzoniere, Petrarch uses the verb cantare (e.g., in Rvf 23). 5 Terence Cave, “Maurice Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 117. 6 Robert Pogue Harrison writes: “[Dante] was forever trying to find his way out of a ‘dark wood’ of past errors,” “Approaching the Vita Nuova,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., 35. 7 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 113.

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shame and concern for repentance in Petrarch’s lyric is absent from Scève’s poetic sequence, and that Scève affirms his love without moral ambivalence. We read of anguish and suffering related to love, yet not of shame or remorse: for example, “Ainsi Amour, perdu à nous, rendit / Vexation, qui donne entendement” (D 94.9–10). Instead of blaming himself, the poet implicitly places responsibility for his suffering on the personified figure of Amour. The poet’s affliction of “vexation” with introspection leads to transcendence and understanding. This evolution in understanding is consonant with a Dantesque progression; Christian Moevs writes that Dante “aimed at a Truth in which all differences are reconciled.”8 This reconciliation includes mysticism and intellect, passion and virtue; such reconciliation occurs in the final dizain of Délie. Scève’s line, quoted above, reveals the resolution of inner conflict through understanding, which contrasts with Petrarch’s schema. Petrarch opens the Canzoniere with tropes of the performance of sounds evoking regret about the past: “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono” (You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound: Rvf 1.1), the canzoniere being a songbook genre, following the troubadour chansonnier collections. The emphasis is on the evocation of the sad experience (albeit in the fragmentary, cyclical format of a lyric sequence, rather than in a novella or prosimetrum) for an audience or community, one that includes Petrarch. Petrarch overtly places himself at the center as the performer, singing his lover’s complaint (the Occitan planh). For his suffering, the poet-narrator hopes to obtain pity, and perhaps forgiveness: “Spero trovar pietà, non che perdono” (I hope to find pity, not only pardon: Rvf 1.8). Forgiveness for perceived transgressions and hope for salvation would ultimately come from God. While Petrarch appeals to an exclusive, elite circle of readers, he scorns the common people (“popol tutto,” Rvf 1.9) who view him as a “favola” (a fable or subject for gossip). This vulgar, ignorant audience is distinguished from those few reading the sonnet, who are entreated to look favorably upon Petrarch’s vain love-suffering and transgression. This is congruent with the stilnovo poets’ intellectual ambition and aristocratic tastes, though they often wrote in bourgeois Florence.9 Does Petrarch include himself among those who are pleased by illusory, foolish things, fleeting dreams, “breve sogno” (Rvf 1.14)? Sighs, solitary shame, and regret are the fruits of his love, rather than joy, fulfilment, or union.

8 Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 10. 9 On this stilnovista characteristic, see Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love, 205–6.

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In the huitain in Délie, Scève seeks to distinguish himself from other poets writing about love: Non de Venus les ardentz estincelles, Et moins les traictz, desquels Cupido tire: Mais bien les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles Je t’ay voulu en cest Oeuvre descrire. Je scay asses, que tu y pourras lire Mainte erreur, mesme en si durs Epygrammes: Amour (pourtant) les me voyant escrire En ta faveur, les passa par ses flammes.

This is followed by the motto “Souffrir non souffrir.” The verb souffrir in moyen français, from the Latin sufferre (sub + fero), besides meaning “to suffer” (the verb’s English cognate) or “to undergo,” can also mean “to permit” or “to accept.” The negation “non” divides the verb repeated in the infinitive, and at the same time the verb is presented with its opposite, forming an antithesis with tension. Since the verbs are in the infinitive, they are impersonal and we do not know whether they refer to Scève, Délie, or others. The wordplay illustrates the topos of the bittersweet nature of love, combining pain and joy with recurrent suffering. A similar pattern is reflected in Scève’s use of the Promethean myth, and the theme of renewed deaths, both of which involve repetition. In formal terms, the text is composed from a series of discrete textual units (not stanzas or strophes, but a collection of epigrammatic poems) rather than continuous lines of verse: a dizain sequence, each with its own opening and closing lines. The reader’s eye is drawn to the next dizain, providing continuity, and to the woodcuts. Michèle Clément reads the opening lines as “un échec” of Petrarchism and Neoplatonism in Délie, indicating that Scève pursues another mode for his love poetry that is more consistent with Dante’s.10 Scève’s first dizain contains the well-known Petrarchan reference to “jeunes erreurs,” alluding to Petrarch’s “giovenile errore” in Rvf 1: L’Oeil trop ardent en mes jeunes erreurs Girouettoit, mal cault, à l’impourveue: Voicy (ô paour d’agreables terreurs) Mon Basilisque avec sa poignant’ veue Perçant Corps, Coeur, et Raison despourveue, Vint penetrer en l’Ame de mon Ame. Grand fut le coup, qui sans tranchante lame Fait, que vivant le Corps, l’Esprit desvie,

10 Michèle Clément, “Scève, Dante et la valeur féminine dans Délie,” 232.

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Piteuse hostie au conspect de toy, Dame, Constituée idole de ma vie. (D 1)

Despite the Petrarchan veneer of “jeunes erreurs,” Scève’s dizain departs from the Petrarchan model of penitential soliloquy in Rvf 1.11 The jeunes erreurs occurred before he encountered Délie; subsequently, all youthful wandering ceased and his life thereafter focused on her, from the coup of the innamoramento symbolized by the basilisk’s piercing glance. This love occurs after the jeunes erreurs, and loving Délie, while at times painful, is not an error, moral or otherwise. Petrarch’s primo giovenile errore, signifying his innamoramento with Laura, leads to futility and suffering in vain. Erreurs is plural, analogous to Dante’s “screen ladies” in the Vita nuova, whom Dante abandoned to focus exclusively on Beatrice. Dante’s vita nova (“Incipit vita nova,” VN 1.1) begins with Beatrice, and Scève’s new life likewise begins with Délie.12 Time is a predominant theme for Petrarch, as Rvf 1 demonstrates. For Scève in dizain 1, time does not bring the same evolution in the poet-persona; while he loves across time, verb tenses reflect a continuous present in fait and desvie, whereas other verbs are conjugated to recount events in the past (girouettoit, vint, fut). Scève inverts Petrarchan themes in dizains 1 and 449: Petrarch began with one (errore) and ended with many scattered (rime sparse, rerum fragmenta), whereas Scève began with many (jeunes erreurs) and ended with one (Délie, union, commemoration); with Petrarch the movement is toward breakdown and oblivion as he strives to forget Laura, whereas with Scève the poetry moves toward coalescence. Terence Cave comments on dizain 449 that Scève’s love for Délie “will be remembered without a trace of penitential doubt. Délie flamboyantly corrects Petrarch’s errors by celebrating the triumph of love over time.”13 In the Triumphi, Petrarch has time triumph over love. In Rvf 1, Petrarch glosses his own text, condemning youthful error, and scatters his words for the moral benefit of his readers and himself.14 Scève’s huitain admits that the reader might find “mainte erreur” (another Petrarchan echo with a different sense), but this refers to his poetry, not the moral rectitude or justesse of his love. The poetry was produced under love’s watch and refined in love’s flames,

11 Terence Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 115. 12 In Le curieux désir, Hans Staub notes that Scève in D 1 “commence sa nouvelle vie, sa vita nuova, ainsi ce dizain marque-t-il le début d’une prise de connaissance de soi-même dans sa nouvelle situation” (55). 13 Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 116. 14 Cave, “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors,” 115.

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according to the huitain, and thus it became a sequence of “durs Epygrammes” that would endure throughout time. Concerning sources for Scève’s basilisk in dizain 1, in Alain Chartier’s La belle dame sans mercy (1424), the basilisk appears (“qui occient les gens des yeulx”), and this is taken up by Marot, who writes, “Le basilic occist les gens des yeulx.”15 In Rvf 135, Petrarch compares his lady through periphrasis to a dangerous, wild creature whose eyes, if met, can cause death in the viewer: “’l bel viso santo / et gli occhi vaghi fien cagion ch’io pera / di questa fera angelica innocente” (her lovely holy face and desirous eyes will cause my death to come by this angelic innocent wild creature: Rvf 135.43–45). In this case the French passages are closer to Scève’s use of the basilisk in Délie. The Petrarchan passage lacks the intensity of dizain 1, in which Délie is not characterized as an angelic, innocent creature, but as a potent and irresistible danger for the poet-lover. “Hostie” indicates Scève’s status henceforth as an unwitting sacrificial victim. There is no sacrifice motif in Rvf 1. In line 8, l’esprit desvie indicates that Scève’s version of straying from the path contrasts with Petrarch’s, and is not a moral or Christian straying: the spirit deviates from the body and nearly leaves it (a quasi death). The esprit survives the great blow of the innamoramento, which strikes the inner life rather than the outer physical being. The path the poet-lover was compelled to follow is indicated by the power of the lady’s glance. It is a sweet slaying (agreables terreurs, Idole de ma vie), and unlike a conventional battle in that the body is left intact but the spirit is struck. Concerning Scève’s hermeticism, Joseph Pivato16 cites a sonnet of Guido Guinizzelli, “Lo vostro bel saluto e ’l gentil sguardo” (“Your beautiful greeting and gentle gaze”), which alludes to the innamoramento in terms similar to those of Scève in dizain 1. Here is Guinizzelli’s sonnet: Lo vostro bel saluto e ’l gentil sguardo che fate quando v’encontro, m’ancide; Amor m’assale e già non ha reguardo s’elli face peccato over merzede, ché per mezzo lo cor me lanciò un dardo ched oltre ‘n parte lo taglia e divide

15 Quoted in Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, notes to D 1. Alain Chartier, “L’excusacion de Maistre Allain” [Les Excuses de Maître Alain], in La belle dame sans mercy (1424), vv. 73–76. Marot, Le Balladin, v. 183. Defaux also mentions the Petrarchan passage Rvf 135.31–45 as being the most important for D 1 (“et surtout Pétrarque”), and Doranne Fenoaltea’s article, “Three Animal Images in the Délie,” BHR 1972, 418–22. 16 Pivato, 24. Pivato cites Guinizzelli’s sonnet concerning the effect of the lady’s greeting on the lover, and the sonnet contains affinities with Scève’s D 1.

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parlar non posso, ché ‘n pene io ardo, sì come quelli che sua morte vede. Per li occhi passa come fa lo trono, che fer’ per la finestra de la torre e ciò che dentro trova spezza e fende: remango como statua d’ottono ove vita né spirto non ricorre, se non che la figura d’omo rende. (Your lovely greeting and the gentle gaze You give me when I meet you kill me: Love assaults me and still is unconcerned Whether he does me good or ill, For he shot an arrow through my heart’s center That cuts one part from the other and divides the whole: I cannot speak since I burn in great pain Like a man who sees his own death. It passes through my eyes, like a thunderbolt That strikes through a tower window And shatters and splits what it finds inside. I stand quietly like a brass statue With no life or spirit flowing, Filling out the bare shape of a man.)17

The poet-lover is struck by the blow of the lady’s glance, however gentile it may be. His heart is split by love’s arrow (the blow passes through the eyes to the heart), and death is close; his spirit, body, and soul are threatened by the intensity of the event, just as Scève recounts. The poet becomes a hollow statue, his spirit having sustained a blow. Guinizzelli employs the language of war: lanciò un dardo, taglia e divide, quelli che sua morte vede (when soldiers are mortally wounded), la figura d’omo rende (the moment of death), and most importantly, the lady’s glance “m’ancide,” as “Amor m’assale.” In Rvf 291, Petrarch echoes this exact phrase, also in line 3 of his sonnet: “Amor m’assale ond’ io mi discoloro . . .” (Love assails me, and I turn pale: Rvf 291.3; emphasis mine). One circumstance contributing to the imaginary nature of Petrarch’s beloved Laura is Petrarch’s solitude; he never married, having taken vows, and his treatise De vita solitaria is “unyieldingly misogynistic.”18 Between the De vita text and the guilt expressed in the Secretum and Canzoniere, it seems psychologically plausible that Laura is not real or so idealized as to be imaginary in comparison to any human model; Petrarch’s friend Giacomo Colonna doubted

17 Guinizzelli (poem 6), English trans. Robert Edwards (1987). 18 Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, 16.

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Laura’s existence. Though we cannot infer biography from the lyric poetry, we can examine the pertinent historical background, including the author’s biography, which could provide context for an interpretation of the poetry. Petrarch sired two illegitimate children. Dante wed Gemma Donati in an apparently arranged marriage and had children, and his wife was not with him in his exile. Dante alluded to Eve for her primordial transgression (for example, Purg. 29. 26–28 and 32.32), but we do not find vituperative misogyny in the extant writings of Dante or Scève as we find in Petrarch’s De vita solitaria (misogyny is present in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio as well). We can recognize what resonates as psychologically persuasive and compelling in a textual evocation. Laura’s character was created within the poetry according to lofty ideals existing in the poet’s imagination. Beatrice and Délie were also unreal and idealized, but they were more developed as individual literary characters than Petrarch’s Laura, and each of the other poet-personae interacts with his beloved. Were she an historical person, one whose beauty would fade with time, Laura would never live up to Petrarch’s ideals: actual relations might lead to disillusionment and disappointment. Even so, this observation does not advance our understanding of the Canzoniere, characterized by lament and regret about unattainable love. Petrarch the author wrote misogynist statements elsewhere; his poet-persona in the Canzoniere has minimal interaction with the lady he loves, according to the text, and he never attains his heart’s desire. He ultimately renounces his love for her because he apparently believes it is sinful, even without consummation. These conditions do not apply to Dante or Scève in their respective texts. Even if these male poets held misogynistic views about women in general, other distinctions delineated here are germane to their poetic works. In his Latin biographical portrait of Petrarch, De vita et moribus Francisci Petracchi de Florentia (composed ca. 1348, in medias res for Petrarch’s life), Boccaccio writes that Petrarch’s love for “Lauretta” may have to be interpreted as “allegorice.”19 This is an acknowledgment during the poet’s lifetime, by an illustrious contemporary author and admirer, of the problematic nature of Petrarch’s love for Laura and his dissidio; perhaps Boccaccio is excusing Petrarch. Petrarch seems to prefer the unreal lady who occupies the poet-persona’s mind and heart. Scève’s conception of love is more inflected by experience than Petrarch’s, even as Délie’s portrayal is adorned with mythological and symbolic aspects. The Canzoniere is more solipsistic, with distance between the poetry and lived experience. For example, Scève writes in dizain 196: “Car du plaisir,

19 “Laurettam illam allegorice pro laurea corona” (Laura is an allegory for the laurel crown), De vita et moribus, §26.

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qu’avecques toy j’avoys” (line 7), alluding to “seinz precieux” (D 236.7) and “ton sein delicieux” (D 408.6). Petrarch’s evocation of imagined pleasure is oblique, and he does not allude to erotic pleasure. When Scève writes, “delices de mon Ame” (D 159.2), the soul’s joy does not exclude sensual pleasure. Petrarch and Scève write of the lady as warrior and of love as war. The conception of love common to Dante and Scève involves the synthesis of opposites. Topoi of war occur in the poetry of antiquity, in the medieval text of Andreas Capellanus in which the lover serves in Love’s army, and in the Roman de la rose, in Jean de Meun’s conclusion of the second part: Amant, with Venus’s indispensable help, storms the fortifications where the rose is imprisoned and attains his desire. The scene parodies a strategic attack, planned and carried out with tactical support from allies. In antiquity, Roman love poetry presents the erotic theme of one-on-one combat. Aphrodite and Ares (the Roman Venus and Mars), representing love and war, are adulterous lovers. Cupid assaults his hapless victims, who are chosen deliberately or frivolously as targets for his arrows, bows and arrows being weapons for hunting and battle. There is mortal risk involved in love, according to models involving predation. The poetry of Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti accommodates this view of love. Dante imagined a violent scene between lover and stony lady in the second canzone of the rime petrose, which exerted a significant influence on Petrarch, as Durling has shown.20 Scève alludes to his “guerre” (for example, D 408.8 and D 446.7), like Petrarch’s “guerra” (Rvf 164 et passim); the poet-persona is at war (Rvf 164). In “Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra” (Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war: Rvf 134), Petrarch evokes his struggle, which does not involve direct engagement with Laura, but internal conflict. Dizain 309 describes a different sort of battle at close quarters: Plus pour ebat, que non pour me douloir De toujours estre en passions brulantes, Je contentois mon obstiné vouloir: Mais je sentis ses deux mains bataillantes, Qui s’opposoient aux miennes travaillantes, Pour mettre à fin leur honneste desir. Ainsi, Enfant, comme tu peulx saisir, Et (quand te plait) hommes, et Dieux conquerre: Ainsi tu fais (quand te vient à plaisir) De guerre paix, et de celle paix guerre. (D 309)

20 See Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 9. See also Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal (1990).

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In this dizain, an ostensibly “Petrarchan” topos, love as war, is used in a most un-Petrarchan manner. Scève apostrophizes the child-god Cupid, demonstrating the latter’s universal power in a scene with frivolity and play (ébat) rather than long pent-up desire. Coitus may be envisioned as violent or vigorous activity followed by calm, and this is one sense of the paix-guerre opposition. Cupid takes pleasure in subjecting his victims to the torments of love, alternating between peace and war. If love is conceived as conquest, then the goal is victory, not peace (peace being the opposite of war, like harmony juxtaposed with discord). The “peace” in this context is the quiescence of the conquered and the absence of violent struggle, not genuine peace with accord and serenity. Calm can also signify sexual satiation. We infer that the poet-persona in dizain 309 attains victory. The rhymed vocabulary reflects the war waged: conquerre (conquérir)/guerre, as well as désir/saisir/plaisir and brûlantes/bataillantes/travaillantes. Scève justifies his “honneste” desire as legitimate. The owner of the “deux mains” is unnamed, though it seems to be Délie. Dante and Petrarch emerged from a tradition of vernacular love poetry that includes the troubadours, whose lyrics were sung or recited aloud as part of an oral culture: poetry was linked with music, and the sound was an essential component in the experience. Petrarch’s traditional canzone form, and terms such as cantare and suono, which appear repeatedly in his verses, reflect an acute awareness of the sounds of the poetry and its lyrics. A prime example of this occurs in the opening of canzone Rvf 23: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, che nascer vide et ancor quasi in erba la fera voglia che per mio mal crebbe, perché cantando il duol si disacerba, canterò com’ io vissi in libertade mentre Amor nel mio albergo a sdegno s’ebbe. (. . .) che volendo parlar, cantava sempre, mercé chiamando con estrania voce (Rvf 23.1–5 and 62–63, emphasis mine) (In the sweet time of my first age, which saw born and still almost unripe the fierce desire which for my hurt grew—because singing, pain becomes less bitter—I shall sing how then I lived in liberty while Love was scorned in my abode [. . .] I sang always, calling for mercy with wondrous voice.)

The idea that the poet sings (canta) to express his sentiments is a convention within Petrarch’s textual composition of the poem. Petrarch writes on paper that he sings in hopes of winning mercy from Laura: he uses the verb cantare three times in Rvf 23 alone. Scève alludes to the same convention in several

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dizains, for example, “par chansons tristesse / Se tourne à joye” (D 239.4–5); and in dizain 18: Qui se delecte à bien narrer histoires Perpetuant des haultz Princes les gestes: Qui se triumphe en superbes victoyres, Ou s’enaigrist aux Satyres molestes, Qui chante aussi ses amours manifestes, Ou se complainct à plaisamment descrire Farces, et Jeux esmouvantz Gentz à rire. Mais moy: je n’ay d’escrire aultre soucy, Fors que de toy, et si ne sçay que dire, Sinon crier mercy, mercy, mercy. (D 18, emphasis mine)

References to farces and jeux (line 7) are medieval in origin, and remain part of French popular culture in the sixteenth century. Likewise, line 5, “Qui chante aussi ses amours manifestes,” refers to medieval poets who gave an oral performance before an audience, whereas this is a sixteenth-century printed text destined to be read.21 The topos of the lady’s “mercy” (line 10) is pertinent for troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, Alain Chartier, and Scève. In dizain 18, the poem’s argument sets aside eloquence, praise, persuasion, rhetorical adornment, and amusement (while expressing negation in the fixed form of a rhyming dizain). Scève employs recusatio, just as he does in the huitain of Délie (“Non de Venus les ardentz estincelles,” etc.). Gérard Defaux suggests that the “mercy” reference in D 18.10 is inspired by La belle dame sans mercy, and Scève would have encountered the topos in Italian verse as well. In Petrarch’s Rvf 126, mercy has a Christian flavor, the poet hoping that his lady will intercede in heaven for him through her love: “Amor l’inspiri / in guisa che sospiri / sì dolcemente che mercé m’impetre et faccia forza al cielo” (Love will inspire her to sigh so sweetly that she will win mercy for me and force Heaven: Rvf 126.35–38). Petrarch will obtain mercé from the lady not in the form of her favors, but in Christian terms, so that his soul will not be condemned to hell for his sins. This is not the sense of Scève’s use of mercy. In Délie, Scève refers to béatitude, which in dizain 152 rhymes with servitude, the latter accenting the courtly dynamic of the lover’s fealty, bound to obey his lady as domina: Je sens le noud de plus en plus estraindre Mon ame au bien de sa beatitude,

21 The Jeux floraux, the poetic concours in Toulouse founded in 1323, awarded prizes (metallic flowers including violet, wild rose, and marigold) for the best poems in langue d’oc and langue d’oïl. Ronsard won a silver églantine prize in 1554.

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Tant qu’il n’est mal qui la puisse constraindre A delaisser si doulce servitude. Et si n’est fiebvre en son inquietude Augmentant plus son alteration Que fait en moy la variation De cest espoir, qui, jour et nuict, me tente. Quelle sera la delectation, Si ainsi doulce est l’umbre de l’attente? (D 152)

Scève reaches for fufilment in imagining the ecstatic end of his desire for Délie (lines 9–10). These lines infuse the dizain with an erotic subtext and alter the religious sense of béatitude. Petrarch expressed a similar sentiment in the canzone Rvf 264 about the anticipation of greater pleasure in the future, which may be a source for D 152.10. However, Petrarch’s line takes as a point of departure for the comparison his earthly desire, which is happy in its ills, “mal suo qua giù sì lieta” (line 51). This is placed in the context of an asexual, spiritual heaven after death, not an erotic encounter: “quanto fia quel piacer, se questo è tanto?” (what will that pleasure be, if this is so great?: Rvf 264.54). We recall Dante’s line in the petrosa canzone “Io son venuto al punto de la rota” (I’ve come to the conjunction of the wheel): “se ’l martiro è dolce, la morte de’ passar ogni altro dolce” (if the suffering is sweet, the death must surpass every other sweet: 64–65). Petrarch strips away the erotic subtext of Dante’s line, but Scève restores it in dizain 152. Scève uses the adjective “doulce,” similar to Dante’s “dolce.” Petrarch calls his desire for Laura “falso dolce fuggitivo” (false fleeting sweetness: Rvf 264.28) and “ardor fallace” (deceiving flame: Rvf 264.45). For Petrarch, beatitude cannot involve union with Laura, whereas for Dante with Beatrice, and for Scève with Délie, beatitude accommodates the potential for erotic desire with union, whose ardore is aligned with virtue, and is not fallace. Whereas Scève adapts certain phrases from Petrarch, a fundamental distinction emerges between Petrarch and Scève in the underlying framework of beliefs about love. Scève again pairs béatitude with servitude in rhyme, adding ingratitude in dizain 305: Mon ame en Terre (un temps fut) esprouva Des plus haultz Cieulx celle beatitude, Que l’oeil heureux en ta face trouva, Quand il me mit au joug de servitude. Mais, las, depuis que ton ingratitude . . . (D 305.1–5)

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Scève juxtaposes language describing paradise with that describing suffering in hell. One moment he is euphoric, and the next he plunges into a gouffre amer. In dizain 69 he writes of being “plongé au Stix de la melancolie” (line 1). The river Styx of Greek mythology figures in Dante’s Inferno.22 In Petrarch’s Canzoniere it occurs once in reference to Charon, in a periphrasis of his own death: “ch’i non tema del noccher di Stige” (so that I may not fear the ferryman of Styx; Rvf 58.13). In Scève’s dizain 370, the reader finds the same set of rhyming words, béatitude/servitude/ingratitude, as above, but presented in a different order. In both dizains, béatitude is the first to rhyme, and the other substantives descend from that, creating a downward-plunging movement reinforced by “cheute au fons” (D 370.7): De mon hault bien toute beatitude Est cheute au fons de ton ingratitude: Dont mes espritz recourvrantz sentement, Fuyent au joug de la grand servitude De desespoir, Dieu d’eternel tourment. (D 370, 6–10)

Line 10 recalls Dante’s inscription on the gates of Hell, “lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (abandon all hope, you who enter: Inf. 3.9). The poet-persona feels burdened as a shade in Hell with the torment of despair. Scève despairs elsewhere, questioning attainment of the good. The verb he uses is the infinitive pénétrer, which denotes a type of speculation: “Or que seroit à penetrer au bien, / Qui au parfaict d’elle jamais ne fault?” (D 397.5–6) In the context of the dizain, “parfaict” seems to allude to Délie’s image: thus, the good that is always true to her image. At the dizain’s conclusion, Scève writes of being lost in Délie’s image: “Et me pers tout en sa divine image” (D 397.10). He states that she is reflected in him: in his memory and through his poetry about her. He calls his memory “mes tristes Archives” (192.10), where he keeps his pain hidden “en l’obscur” (D 192.10). He believes that he reflects her image, which she should therefore not destroy: Et ce divin, et immortel visage Non seulement les hommes brule, et gele Mais moy aussi, où est ta propre image. (D 230.8–10)

22 The river Styx (Stige) is mentioned in Inf. 7.108, 9.80, and 14.116.

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Lost at sea Like Guinizzelli, Dante, and Petrarch, Scève occasionally employs imagery of wandering at sea: Comme corps mort vagant en haulte Mer, Esbat des Ventz, et passetemps des Undes, J’errois parmi ce Gouffre amer, Où mes soucys enflent vagues profondes. Lors toy, Espoir, qui en ce poinct te fondes Sur le confus de mes vaines merveilles, Soubdain au nom d’elle tu me resveilles De cest abysme, auquel je perissoys: Et à ce son me cornantz les oreilles, Tout estourdy point ne me congnoissoys. (D 164)23

Petrarch’s sonnet Rvf 189 of the Canzoniere has been cited as a source for this dizain because of the common imagery of death at sea to represent despair in love. On close examination, however, we find that the two poems are quite different. Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio per aspro mare, a mezza notte il verno, enfra Scilla et Caribdi; et al governo siede ’l signore, anzi ’l nimico mio. A ciascun remo un penser pronto et rio che la tempesta e ’l fin par ch’abbi a schermo; la vela rompe un vento humido eterno di sospir’, di speranze et di desio. Pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia di sdegni bagna et rallenta le già stanche sarte, che son d’error con ignorantia attorto. Celansi i duo mei dolci usati segni; morta fra l’onde è la ragione et l’arte, tal ch’incomincio a desperar del porto. (Rvf 189) (My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy; each oar is manned by a ready, cruel thought that seems to scorn the tempest and the end; a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires breaks the sail; a rain of weeping, a mist of disdain wet and loosen the already weary ropes, made of error twisted up with ignorance.

23 Nathalie Dauvois has analyzed D 164 at length; see “Dizain CLXIV,” in Dix études sur Maurice Scève, 183–90.

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My two usual sweet stars are hidden; dead among the waves are reason and skill; so that I begin to despair of the port.)

Petrarch creates an allegorical scene in which a ship caught in a winter storm at sea cannot reach the port, whereas Scève develops the image of a corpse floating on the waves, perhaps after a shipwreck (though this is not specified). Each poet evokes hope in divergent ways: in Petrarch’s sonnet, hope contributes to the ship’s damage, as the destructive wind of a tempest, rather than indispensable sea wind in fair weather, which moves the ship forward. Hope is one of three elements forming the wind that fills the sails, causing them to rip or become unmoored. Perhaps the “tempesta” in Rvf 189 is inspired by Dante’s “tempesta” in Inferno 5, the whirlwind that buffets the lustful: “come fa mar per tempesta, / se da contrari venti è combattuto” (like the sea beneath a tempest, when it is battered by opposing winds: Inf. 5.29). In Scève’s dizain, hope rouses the corpse by filling his ears with the name Délie, thus reviving the floating body of the poet-lover. Délie’s name is not mentioned in this dizain (nor is Laura in Rvf 189). Dizain 164 mentions no tempest, no Scylla or Charybdis (anywhere in Délie), no rain or wind. For Petrarch, the ship’s oars symbolize guilty thoughts; the wind in his sails symbolize sighs, hopes, and desires; and the rain, tears. His two guiding beacons, Laura’s eyes as familiar signs of comfort, are absent. Petrarch claims his customary rhetorical dexterity and reason ostensibly fail him, so that he despairs of a solution. By contrast, Scève opens his dizain by comparing himself to a corpse floating on the waters, subject to the wind and waves, bereft even of a ship. His worries fill the waves. Maritime imagery gives way to the Gouffre amer and abysme, infernal images filled with death, consistent with the many deaths that Scève announced in the huitain: “les mortz qu’en moy tu renovelles”. We are not presented with a series of allegorical parallels creating the navigation scene of a ship in trouble, as in Petrarch’s sonnet. Each poet-persona expresses turmoil, unable to find his way; this involves maritime metaphors, but distinctions in the respective poems outweigh their similarities.24 Scève’s language reflects a preoccupation with wandering, with being lost, confused, and trapped in an abyss: the verbs vaguer, errer, périr; and the words ébat, étourdi. This is Dantesque, for the Commedia introduces such motifs from its incipit. The pair of cognates fonder (“toy, Espoir, qui . . . te fondes,” line 5) and the adjective profondes (modifying vagues) emphasize the depth of the abyss. Scève loses himself, as if drowning: “poinct ne me congnoissoys”

24 In their notes, Joukovsky and Defaux, following Dauvois, refer the reader of D 164 to Petrarch’s Rvf 189, especially the first stanza. McFarlane refers the reader to Henri Weber’s Creation poétique, 206. Parturier cites Rvf 189 and 235. I hope to have shown that D 164 is only superficially “Petrarchan.”

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(line 10). The loss of consciousness is comparable to Dante’s, notably at the end of Inferno 5. It represents loss of reason and clarity. The poet no longer knows himself: he is displaced, confused, lost. In Inferno 20, Dante refers to the sommersi (line 3), those who are submerged in the Eighth Circle, Malebolge. Dante revises the myth of Ulysses in Inferno 26: as a fraudulent counselor also relegated to the Eighth Circle, Ulysses is shipwrecked and fails to reach Ithaca. The shades in Hell are submerged, since they are inside the earth and cannot escape their fate. Each time Délie refuses to grant Scève her mercy or bien, he plunges downward. Dizain 393 evokes a tempest of the passions, congruent with Rvf 189: Je voys, et viens aux ventz de la tempeste De ma pensée incessamment troublée: Ores à Poge, or’ à l’Orse tempeste, Ouvertement, et aussi à l’emblée, L’un apres l’aultre, en commune assemblée De doubte, espoir, desir, et jalousie, Me foudroyantz telz flotz la fantaisie Abandonnée et d’aydes, et d’appuys. Parquoy durant si longue phrenesie, Ne povant plus, je fais plus que ne puis. (D 393)

Scève does not use the image of a boat as Petrarch does, but the phantasmagoric interior tempest rages, with elaboration of desire, hope, and doubt.25 The imagery of “L’un après l’aultre, en commune assemblée” (line 5) recalls the shades buffeted by the infernal tempest in Inferno 5, transfigured from characters to abstract emotions. Scevian turmoil and despair correspond to the condition of the Dantean tempest of the lustful passions, an allegory of the turmoil of erotic desire not controlled by the will or self-discipline. For Petrarch, the desire for Laura is vain, as is the consequent suffering, “le vane speranze e ’l van dolore” (Rvf 1.6). In Rvf 366 he blames the causes of his love, which are “Medusa et l’error mio” (Rvf 366.111). But for Scève, the desire and suffering are not in vain, nor do they constitute vanity: the flame represents their love, which fuses ardor and virtue, and which will exist in memory as inscribed in the poet’s verses. This is an affirmation, not abnegation as we find in Petrarch. Scève the poet-lover inscribes his love for Délie in the illustrious tradition of great loves immortalized in poetry. The flamme si saincte and luysante is the flame of love that shines for others, incorporating ardor and virtue even after the body’s demise. Scève prefigures the conclusion to his dizain sequence with the image of a

25 Henri Weber discusses D 393 in the context of Rvf 189 in La création poétique, 205.

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commemorative flame: “ton sainct feu, qui à tout bien m’allume, / Resplendira à la posterité” (D 23.9–10). Just as the poet-lover burned with love for Délie, the fire in her honor commemorates her, symbolizing the continued existence of his poetry for future generations of readers and lovers. Dante and Scève as poet-characters devote themselves to love without remorse about theological damnation. Scève characterizes Délie as “Constituée Idole de ma vie” (D 1.10) with apparent disregard for theological implications. Dante condemns irresponsible adulterous courtly lovers, but this does not prevent his sustained adoration of Beatrice as a wondrous lady in the Vita nuova and Commedia. In a major departure from Petrarch’s lyric, the concept of damnation within Scève’s dizains is immediate, stemming from love-suffering and isolation from his beloved, as opposed to Christian dread of future divine judgment for sins committed. Scève writes: Je ne l’ay veue encor, ne toy congneue L’erreur, qui tant de coulpe m’imposa: Sinon que foy en sa purité nue Causast le mal, à quoy se disposa Ton leger croire, et tant y reposa, Que ton coeur froid s’y mit totallement: Dont j’ay en moy conclu finablement De composer à toute repentence, Puisque ma vie on veut cruellement Pour autruy faulte offrir à penitence. (D 34)

The Christian framework in this dizain with its use of the words foi, repentence, and pénitence is arranged to express metaphorically the poet’s lament of unrequited love, rather than being a vehicle for Christian prayer. Religious terms are pressed into service to evoke intense personal love. Scève struggles to pinpoint his culpable act. “Le mal” seems to signify a wound rather than evil, although the religious vocabulary suits the context of seemingly unjust condemnation. The poet’s only erreur having been to faithfully love Délie, he is condemned to suffer not because it is immoral or sinful to love her, but because she does not respond to his appeals. I would interpret “à toute repentence” (line 8) as a moment of self-reference, since Scève’s own life is offered in “penitence.” Toute could refer to lover and beloved, in a syntactically ambiguous phrase typical of Scève.26 One is penitent in hopes of receiving forgiveness and redemption.

26 Joukovsky reads line 8 to mean that Scève will repent even for another’s transgression; McFarlane reads it to mean that the poet will accept Délie’s repentance. Defaux cites Petrarch and Ovid as sources for D 34, and indicates that Scève adopts a strategy of repentance.

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Scève’s poetic persona resolved to write the poetry as an expression of (futile) repentance for that steadfast love which brought him much anguish, although he considers himself innocent. His indictment of Délie for cruelty is counterbalanced by his deferential gesture of penitence toward her, akin to Dante’s “penitence” toward Beatrice. Meanwhile, Délie’s indifference to his anguish is identified with perfidy, in contrast to Scève’s fidelity in love, in accordance with courtly dynamics. Scève seems to want to purge himself of the love through the composition of poetry. Yet this intention is not borne out by the work’s development: the love is not purged away or transmuted. Petrarch’s Rvf 207 has been identified as a source for this dizain: “Così di ben amar porto tormento / et del peccato altrui cheggio perdono” (Thus from loving well I gain torments, and I ask to be pardoned for another’s crime: Rvf 207.79–80).27 We have seen that Petrarch and Scève exploited a poetic fonds commun of themes, devices, and topoi from the troubadours, courtly love, stilnovo poets, Cavalcanti, and Dante. While Petrarch influenced Scève, Scève also distinguished himself from his illustrious predecessor and drew upon other resources as well. Délie frequently diverges from the Canzoniere, particularly concerning the moral status of erotic desire in the conception of love. Cécile Alduy (2004) points out the paradox of comparing the two lyric sequences: “[La Délie] participe à bien des égards à la liquidation et de la poétique, et de la philosophie morale des Rime sparse.”28 François Rigolot (1982) comments on Scève’s poetic relation to Petrarch: [L]es emprunts à la thématique et au lexique des Rime sont fort modestes. La rhétorique des deux recueils offre quelques points communs mais qu’elle partage avec toute une tradition non pétrarquienne. Ainsi l’usage des antithèses pour exprimer l’intensité du sentiment appartient à la fois au concetto italien et à l’héritage médiéval français . . . Un écart se creuse enfin entre la métaphysique de Pétrarque et celle de Scève: le cadre moral et religieux du XVIe siècle n’est plus celui du XIVe siècle . . . Scève a laicisé Pétrarque. Du strict point de vue de l’aspect formel des recueils la différence est considérable.29

Scholarship often has focused on Petrarch’s self-presentation as a classically oriented humanist who broke with medieval practices, and Petrarch’s influence on Renaissance poetry was profound. The longer poetic lineage including troubadours is emphasized in order to situate Dante, Petrarch, and Scève within context, and to show continuity and innovation in relation to this lineage.

27 Defaux, Délie, vol. 2, note to D 34. 28 See Alduy, “Scève et Pétrarque: De mort à vie,” in Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque, 157 sq. 29 François Rigolot, Le texte de la Renaissance, des rhétoriqueurs à Montaigne, 174.

Conclusion This comparative study has presented Scève’s Délie as a text with a direct poetic filiation to Dante’s works, with the relation characterized as a shadow; the French dizain sequence incorporates motifs and themes of fin’amor and stilnovo poetry as well. Délie also manifests influences from the Canzoniere, classical literature (particularly Roman poets), French literature (including Marot and La belle dame sans mercy, among others), and Neoplatonism. In the Canzoniere, Petrarch composed elegant, polished poetic language and lyric reflections on the self; many aspects of Petrarchism did not originate with Petrarch. Because the courtly love dynamic between lover and lady was usually adulterous and thus subverted social mores, it functioned as an established literary conceit and yet was morally forbidden, since it undermined the stability of marriage within religious, legal, and social structures. The inherent secrecy required discretion, hence the use of coded or secret language, including the senhal. The name of each lady, Beatrice, Laura, and Délie, may be regarded as a senhal with semantic significance. Trobar clus, a stylistic manifestation of secrecy and coding, with meaning veiled by obscurity, was part of the poetic legacy of the Occitan troubadours. Délie incorporates this poetic legacy. In the Inferno, Dante condemns lovers who succumbed to passion: Semiramis, Tristan and Iseut, Helen and Paris, and others whose shades Dante sees in the second circle. Dante does not write of amorous involvement with Beatrice, just as Petrarch does not indicate a relation with Laura. A relation develops between Délie and Scève’s persona. The verses about the beloved evoke longing more than a love affair, unlike the Latin verses of Roman poets Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Tibullus. The study of the human heart is pursued through introspection. Scève explores an involvement with the beloved, including by means of occasional dialogue, couched in symbolic language and mythical context. We have traced the lineage of love lyric from troubadours to stilnovo poets, Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève. The purview of Scève’s Italianism includes his reading of Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch, whose poetry alluded to the troubadours, their common lineage. The central question for our purpose has been how Scève’s poetry bears the imprint of Dante. It was necessary to emphasize this extensive poetic background and fonds commun of conceptions of love to undertake the comparative reading of Dante’s Vita nuova, De vulgari eloquentia, Rime, and Commedia in relation to Scève’s Délie, to see continuity and innovation together, and to account for individual poetic flourishes alongside traditional tropes. The shadow of Dante emerges in Délie through direct and indirect means, including the beloved lady’s attributes, alta virtù and https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-010

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haulte vertu, purifying flames for love and poetry, shadow imagery, and the synthesis of intense desire, love, and virtue: Scève adheres to Dante’s principles in De vulgari eloquentia of salus, venus, and virtus being noble subjects for vernacular poetry. A broad perspective on the poetic lineage enhances our reading of Scève and Dante, and of Scève and Petrarch. Prior to the Pléiade poets, Scève participated in literary imitation that was de rigueur in his time, drawing upon classical, Neoplatonist, and Italian material to enrich his French poetry. The writings of Dante and Cavalcanti informed Ficino’s De amore commentary on Plato’s Symposium, another source for Scève, along with the writings of Leone Ebreo. In the sixteenth century, the printers Guillaume Rouillé (or Roville) and Jean de Tournes, as well as Charles Fontaine, associated Scève with Dante. At the textual level, Dante’s shadow of influence emerges through affinities in figurative language: justifications for composing poetry, the lover becoming divine like Glaucus, color symbolism, motifs of hardness and distillation in love and poetry, purification through flames, ardent love integrated with virtue, and a conception of love that incorporates the erotic. The lover advances along the difficult path to the lady (Beatrice, Délie) by undergoing refinement (of the lover and poetry), melhuramen, culminating in the synthesis of eros and agape for love with the valorization of Scevian haulte vertu in parallel with Dantesque alta virtù. Petrarch differs from Scève and Dante in these and other respects, despite poetic continuity with respect to courtly poetics, imitatio, and conventions of love lyric tradition. Since Scève read other poets besides Petrarch, the reader of Scève benefits from a comprehensive and balanced literary apparatus. I have sought to demonstrate that this apparatus includes Dante’s writings alongside Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Triumphi, and to affirm Scève’s Italianism rather than Petrarchism. Poetry has long functioned as a vehicle for exploring ideas and experiences about love. Classical authors considered love-passion dangerous not because sex was inherently evil or morally corrupt, but because such passion was excessive and disruptive, and led to trouble: disorder, disharmony, loss of power, status and self-discipline, death, and possibly madness (for example, Dido or Phaedra). For the ancients, love did not refine and exalt the lover, in contrast to medieval fin’amor. The Asclepius text in the Corpus Hermeticum presented an instance of divine union through coitus (§ 21), akin to the concept of hierogamy. Scève adopts stilnovo and Dantesque motifs of distillation and purification of poetry and love. This process of refinement includes the character of the poetlover and poetic composition itself. Love involves trial by fire, and the intense suffering produces hard and well-wrought poetry, and leads to union with the beloved and Scevian entendement (D 94.10). This model contrasts with love in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, marked by regret, vain suffering, lament, and renunciation.

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Courtly love literature manifested tensions between erotic passion and moral virtue, and Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Scève handled those tensions differently. The concepts of submission, obedience, self-restraint (mezura), moderation, and loyalty were transposed from the medieval feudal system to the courtly relation with the beloved, a female midons or dompna. Medieval courtly love convention was distinct from conceptions of love in classical literature. We have examined courtly poetic traditions and Délie for context in the poetic filiation between Scève and Dante. The courtly love dynamic, which does not morally condemn amor, provides a framework: as love poets, Dante and Scève incorporate courtly themes into their verses while transcending the courtly dynamic. Dante’s Inferno 5 does not banish love altogether, but condemns (with ambivalence) illicit indulgence stemming from it; Dante the pilgrim’s love undergoes refinement in Purgatorio. The pilgrim encounters Beatrice at the summit of Purgatory, when his guide Virgil leaves him, and subsequently Dante and Beatrice are together in Paradise in the sphere of the moon (Paradiso 2) and beyond. Petrarch’s regret for his obsessive love in the Canzoniere, in accordance with Augustinian and patristic morality concerning erotic desire, deviates from the courtly model, as reflected in Petrarch’s profound ambiguity and dissidio. Scève’s choice to participate in the hermetic tradition through trobar clus resonates: the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, Dante’s poetic predecessor who practised the sestina, appears in Purgatorio 26. Dante’s poetic style tends to be lucid rather than obscure, though the substance is complex and difficult. Dante’s poetry contains rich and hidden meanings to be discerned within the text, and Dante’s rhetorical asprezza (harshness) of verse is congruent with Scève’s poetic practice. The Neoplatonic system enabled the poet to sublimate erotic desire manifested on the physical, earthly level, shifting desire to a metaphysical abstraction in the soul, whose beauty does not fade with time. This transposition sidestepped the stigmata of luxuria, concupiscentia, and adultery, theologically incompatible with salvation; Dante acknowledged lust by relegating the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca to the second circle of Hell (Inf. 5). This has been viewed as a condemnation of Dante’s earlier self in the Vita nuova for the way Dante loved Beatrice and pursued other women. Thus it is significant that Dante the pilgrim faints upon hearing Francesca’s recounting of her story. Dante’s Vita nuova did not denigrate falling in love, though no consummation was indicated between Dante and Beatrice. Petrarch’s verse is open, displayed with linguistic virtuosity for the reader: trobar ric rather than trobar clus. Scève’s poetry is more intense, more uneven, and at times less polished than Petrarch’s, like Dante’s asprezza. With yearning

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and suffering in love, all is meticulously arranged in the Canzoniere: dates, poem numbering, themes, imagery, symbols, and language. Topoi become ornamental rhetorical flourishes to enhance the poems. Petrarch developed a stylized mode with topoi and themes suitable for imitation, developed subsequently in Petrarchist sonnets. Laura is associated with the lauro, the laurel tree and laurels of poetic greatness. She represents Petrarch’s ambition and vanity, and the poetry shifts from desire for another to closed self-referentiality (solipsism). Laura is forbidden not only because she is inaccessible to the poet, whose eloquently expressed love is unrequited; Laura is forbidden theologically because his loving her passionately endangers Petrarch’s soul, since he is supposed to focus on loving God instead of Laura and poetic glory. Petrarch’s Secretum presents an imagined dialogue between himself as Franciscus and Augustinus, who berates him for his misguided love. Amatory yearning is conveyed, entwined with guilt that is absent in the poetic personae of Dante and Scève. Theologically induced guilt about one’s desire diverges from courtly love, whose ideal is joi rather than the condemnation of erotic desire’s fulfilment as sinful fornication. Petrarch’s dissidio is caused by conflict between his religious obligation to love God and his persistent love for Laura. Since Petrarch did not “publish” his Canzoniere in his lifetime, poetic glory for that work was not imminent. He considered Latin poetry superior to the vernacular, though evidently he devoted considerable time and energy over many years to the private project of his Canzoniere. The cycle of the Canzoniere concludes with the renunciation and prayer to the Virgin Mary, the cyclical year whose number of days corresponds to the poems plus one (366). Délie’s death does not figure in Scève’s poetry, as the death of Beatrice and Laura occurs for the Italian poets, respectively. Laura’s death traditionally divided the Canzoniere into two parts, as Pietro Bembo’s 1501 edition with Aldus Manutius initially emphasized, and the second part was elegiac. We may view Dante’s love as progression in a spiral, analogous to the spiral ascending the mountain of Purgatory, while Petrarch’s moves in a downward spiral, leading to pain, despair, and ultimately, renunciation. Then the cycle begins anew, adhering to the liturgical year. Scève does not present a schematic spiral of systematic progression; there are moments of painful, purgatorial struggle and despair. Still, in the midst of the poet’s wandering, an ascent and love-union with fulfilment may be discerned intermittently. Dante’s love for Beatrice and Scève’s for Délie is not presented as being dangerous for either poet’s salvation; suffering is linked to the lover’s unfulfilled desire. Beatrice is aligned with Dante’s salvation, not a barrier to it. Unlike Petrarch with Laura, Dante’s poetic persona does not manifest anxiety that his love for

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Beatrice is blasphemous, verging on sinfulness through idolatry, lust, or vanity. Sensing Beatrice’s presence per occulta virtù, Dante the pilgrim feels the inexorable force of antico amor (Purg. 30), and is reunited in triumph with Beatrice in the Commedia. The love of Dante and Beatrice, and that of Scève and Délie, is characterized by the synthesis of ardor and virtue. Is Petrarch’s Canzoniere the one text that exerts greater poetic influence on Délie than any other? There are sound reasons for scepticism. The response entails clarity in kind and degree concerning this influence, and clarity regarding what we mean when we say that Scève is as “Petrarchan” as other poets who imitate Petrarch. My response to the question “Is Scève a Petrarchan poet?” is a qualified “somewhat” and “in certain respects.” Scève composes a sequence of short-form love poems addressed to an elusive beloved, and participates in the prevailing convention of Renaissance imitatio, selecting and modifying certain imagery, turns of phrase, and themes of Petrarch for his own purposes. Giuliano Perleoni, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Du Bellay in the Olive sonnet sequence wrote poetry that was more Petrarchan than Scève’s lyric. In the later fifteenth century, Petrarchist tropes were exploited in Italian lyric production for court entertainment (e.g., Serafino), but that was not the purpose of Scève’s poetry. My perspective accords with that of McFarlane, Coleman, Alduy, and Pivato more than with that of DellaNeva or Parturier. Scève and Petrarch contrast with respect to morality, tone, and temperament; each poet emphasizes a distinct substance and style. Scève’s highest priority is not eloquence. Petrarch, writing within a lyric tradition, furnished the longest and most eloquent, polished manifestation (perhaps a culmination) of that tradition with his sequence of love poems, mostly in sonnets. The more strictly one defines Petrarchism, the less Petrarchan Scève appears; it makes sense to speak instead of Scève’s Italianism, because this term encompasses Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch.1 Correspondences between Scève and Dante show a closer filiation with Dante than with Petrarch concerning core attributes of love and the beloved. The dynamic contrasts with Petrarch’s alienation from Laura: coalescence versus fragmentation. This reading of Scève’s dizain sequence in light of Dante’s writings illuminates our understanding of Délie’s Italian poetic background, in which Petrarch is not the only Italian figure, nor does he compose his poetry ex nihilo. Petrarch and Scève, each in his own way, wrote within the long literary shadow cast by Dante. Medieval courtly literature, including conceptions of love and the poetic style trobar clus, was an essential precursor for the lyric poetry of Scève and

1 Saulnier, McFarlane, Minta, Alduy et al. have considered this question. For Minta (1977), even “Italianism” is problematic and minimal in Délie in terms of sources.

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Dante. The comparative reading unfolds in the context of the poetic lineage that we have reviewed, in which Dante and stilnovo poets contribute to a prisca poesia for Scève, as conceived in the Florentine humanism of the later Quattrocento.2 The presence of Dante’s poetic shadow has been analyzed in Scève’s Délie. Scève developed allusions to interior hell, purgatory, and paradise consistent with the Commedia, but without Dante’s elaborate hierarchical architecture. Scève’s experiences, including his suspension in Limbo, focus relentlessly on his love for Délie. Scève does not place her in a Christian heaven; instead, she exists in the vast pagan cosmos. Interpreted broadly, love in Délie is conceived as a journey and an awakening, with repeated death and suffering leading to life (de mort à vie) through renewal and joy. Scève’s path is not like Dante’s structured allegorical and narrative progression, but parallels emerge in tropes of poetic composition and refinement, with language indicating ardent love, virtue, and fulfilment. Scève’s metaphorical path is inscribed in the poetic structure of the sequence of dense epigrammatic poems; both journeys lead to transcendent love and poetic achievement that withstands the passage of time. As he does with Petrarch and others, Scève discreetly borrows motifs from Dante, bends them to a preferred shape, and combines allusion with invention. Scève does not engage in extensive, constant imitation of Dante in Délie; many narrative, structural and thematic aspects of the Vita nuova and Commedia are absent. Scève’s dizains are filled with longing and suffering due to separation from his beloved. This is similar to Petrarch’s lyric, but Petrarch’s love for Laura leads to renunciation. If Petrarch brought woman back down to earth after Dante elevated her to the heavens (De Sanctis),3 then Scève exalted her anew within the cosmos, embracing sensual earthly love that becomes divine. Dante and Scève allude to the mythical Glaucus (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), who becomes a sea god: the human nature of each poet-lover is transformed. The way of love required purification, but did not involve renunciation of the poet’s love and desire for the lady. While Scève belongs among Dante’s fedeli d’amore as evoked in the Vita nuova, Petrarch, despite his claim to be the poetic tradition’s culmination in Rvf 70, ultimately relinquishes his position among them with his Augustinian austerity. Petrarch’s devotion to Laura and her symbolism reflected his ambivalence, forming the basis of his dissidio, and concluded in recantation, whereas Scève’s devotion to Délie was affirmed and inscribed in his poetic sequence.

2 Hunkeler, Vif du sens, 197. 3 Francesco De Sanctis, Saggio critico sul Petrarca, ed. Ettore Bonora (Bari: Laterza, 1954), orig. publ. 1879. Cited in Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 7.

Selected Bibliography Editions of Maurice Scève’s Works (annotated) Editions of Sceve’s works, listed in chronological order by publication date: Scève, Maurice. Delie object de plus haulte vertu. Lyon: Sulpice Sabon for Antoine Constantin, 1544. Scève, Maurice. Delie object de plus haulte vertu. Paris: Nicolas du Chemin, 1564. Reprinted with emblems redone. Scève, Maurice. Oeuvres poétiques complètes de Maurice Scève, Délie, la Saulsaye, Le Microcosme, Arion et Poésies diverses, réunies pour la première fois par Bertrand Guégan et publiées avec une Introduction, un Glossaire, des Notes et une Bibliographie. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967. Original edition published by Garnier, 1927, without emblems, although with some illustrations. Schmidt, Albert-Marie. Les poètes du XVIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Pp. 75–224. Without emblems. Scève, Maurice. The ‘Délie’ of Maurice Scève. Edited by I. D. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Critical edition, includes 1544 emblems; see also Dudley Wilson’s 1967 article, “Remarks on Scève’s Délie,” Durham University Journal 29 (1967): 7–12, listing McFarlane’s errors and omissions. Scève, Maurice. Oeuvres poétiques complètes. Edited by Hans Staub. 2 vols. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1970–1971. Without emblems. Scève, Maurice. Délie, 1544. Introduction by Dudley Wilson. Menston (Yorkshire): Scolar Press, 1972. Facsimile of the editio princeps. Scève, Maurice. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Pascal Quignard. Paris: Mercure de France, 1974. No emblems; no notes. Scève, Maurice. Délie, objet de plus haute vertu. Edited by Françoise Charpentier. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Student edition, spelling modernized, with 1564 emblems. Scève, Maurice. Delie, object de plus haulte vertu. Edited by Françoise Joukovsky. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1996. With notes and 1544 emblems. Scève, Maurice. Délie, Object de plus haulte vertu. Critical edition edited by Eugène Parturier. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1987. (first edition, Paris: Hachette, 1916; new edition revised by Cécile Alduy with updated introduction and bibliography, 2001). Scève, Maurice. Delie, object de plus haulte vertu. Edited by Gérard Defaux. 2 vols. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Critical edition with extensive introduction, notes, and bibliography; includes emblems.

Critical edition of complete works: Scève, Maurice. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Michèle Clément. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013-.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-011

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Excerpts in English translation: Fowlie, Wallace, ed. and trans. Sixty Poems of Scève. New York: Swallow Press, 1949. Sieburth, Richard, ed. and trans. Emblems of Desire: Selections from the Délie of Maurice Scève. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. For more information on resources related to Maurice Scève, see Cécile Alduy, Bibliographie des Écrivains Français: Maurice Scève. Rome: Memini, 2006.

Other Primary Sources Alciati, Andrea. Emblematum libellus. Paris: C. Wechel, 1534. Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Lyric Poems. Translated by Joseph Tusiani, with introduction and notes by Giuseppe C. Di Scipio. 2nd ed. Brooklyn: Legas, 1999. Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. Translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Edited by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi. 3 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97. Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Edited by C. H. Grandgent. Revised by Charles S. Singleton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Edited by Giorgio Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67. Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Translated with commentary by Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Edited by Giuseppe Villaroel. Revised by Guido Davico Bonino and Carla Poma. Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Translated by Robert Durling and Ronald L. Martinez. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Alighieri, Dante. Oeuvres complètes de Dante. Translated By André Pézard. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Alighieri, Dante. Opere. Edited by Marco Santagata. 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 2014. Alighieri, Dante. Opere minori. Edited by Bruno Nardi. Milan: Ricciardi, 1988. Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso. Translated by Robert Durling and Ronald L. Martinez. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Alighieri, Dante. Princeton Dante Project [electronic resource]. Commedia, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Vita Nuova, Rime, De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio. The Trustees of Princeton University and Professor Robert Hollander. 1997–99. http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/ index.html. Alighieri, Dante. Purgatorio. Translated by Robert Durling and Ronald L. Martinez. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Alighieri, Dante. Vita Nuova. Edited by. Marcello Ciccuto. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984. Alighieri, Dante. Vita Nuova. Translated by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Andreas Capellanus. The Art of Courtly Love. Translated by John Jay Parry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

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Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus on Love. Translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Carolyn J.B. Hammond. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Augustine of Hippo. De doctrina Christiana. Translated by Roger P. H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Augustine of Hippo. The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions. Translated by Raymond Canning, with introduction by Tarsicius J. Van Bavel. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1996. Bembo, Pietro. Prose della volgar lingua. Edited by Mario Marti. Padua: Liviana, 1955. Bernart de Ventadorn. The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn: Complete Texts, Translations, Notes, and Glossary. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Genealogy of the Pagan Gods [Genealogia deorum gentilium]. Vol. 1, Books I–V, translated by Jon Solomon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. 2nd ed. Edited by Vittore Branca. 10 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1967–98. Cavalcanti, Guido. The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. Translated by Lowry Nelson. New York: Garland, 1986. Cavalcanti, Guido. Rime. Edited by Domenico de Robertis. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Cavalcanti, Guido. Rime. Edited by Marcello Ciccuto, introduction by Maria Corti. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984. Chabaneau, Camille, and Jean Anglade, eds. Les Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux de Jean de Nostredame. Paris: Champion, 1913. Chartier, Alain. Le Cycle de “La Belle Dame sans Mercy.” Edited and translated by David F. Hult. Paris: Champion, 2014. Contini, Gianfranco, ed. La letteratura italiana delle origini. Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Copenhaver, Brian P., ed. and trans. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette. Edited by Charles Méla. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992. Daniel, Arnaut. The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel. Translated by James J. Wilhelm. New York: Garland, 1981. Il Dante. Con argomenti, et dechiaratione de molti luoghi, novamente revisto, et stampato. Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1547. Du Bellay, Joachim. Oeuvres Complètes. Edited by Olivier Millet, Francis Goyet, Richard Cooper, and Marie-Dominique Legrand. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 2003. Du Bellay, Joachim. Œuvres Complètes, Tome III – 1551–1553. Edited by Marie-Dominique Legrand, Michel Magnien, Daniel Ménager, and Olivier Millet. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013. Du Guillet, Pernette. Rymes de gentile et vertueuse dame . . . Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1545. Du Guillet, Pernette. Rymes. Edited by Christian Barataud and Danielle Trudeau. Paris: Champion, 2006. Du Guillet, Pernette. Rymes. Edited by Elise Rajchenbach. Geneva: Droz, 2006.

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Ficin, Marsile. Commentaire sur Le Banquet de Platon, De l’amour. Commentarium in convivium Platonis, De amore. Edited and translated By Pierre Laurens. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012. Ficin, Marsile. Le commentaire de Marsille Ficin, florentin: Sur le Banquet d’amour de Platon. Edited by Stephen Murphy. Translated by Symon Silvius (Jean de la Haye). Paris: Champion, 2004. Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Translated by Sears Jayne. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985. Ficino, Marsilio. Sopra lo amore, ovvero Convito di Platone. Edited by Giuseppe Rensi. Milan: SE, 2003. (edition based on Neri Dortelata: Florence, 1544) Goldin, Frederick. Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. Guilhem de Cabestanh. Les chansons de Guilhem de Cabestanh. Edited by Arthur Langfors. Paris: Champion, 1924. Guinizzelli, Guido. The Poetry of Guido Guinizzelli. Edited and translated by Robert Edwards. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. Guittone d’Arezzo. The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo. Edited by Vincent Moleta. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976. Guittone d’Arezzo. Le rime di Guittone d’Arezzo. Edited by Francesco Egidi. Bari: Laterza, 1940. Idel, Moshe and Bernard McGinn, eds. Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Hébreu, Léon [Leone Ebreo]. Dialogues d’Amour. Translated by Pontus de Tyard (1551). Edited by T. Anthony Perry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Labé, Louise. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by François Rigolot. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. Landino, Cristoforo. Comento sopra la Comedia. Edited by Paolo Procaccioli. 4 vols. Rome: Salerno, 2001. Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la Rose. Edited by Armand Strubel. Paris: Livre de Poche, “Lettres Gothiques,” 1992. Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la rose, dans la version attribuée à Clément Marot. Edited by Silvio F. Baridon. 2 vols. Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1954. Lulle, Raymond [Ramon Llull]. Livre de l’Ami et de l’Aimé. Translated by Patrick Gifreu. Paris: Orphée, La Différence, 1989. Marot, Clément. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by François Rigolot. 2 vols. Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 2007 (vol. 1), 2009 (vol. 2). Nelli, René, and René Lavaud, eds. Les Troubadours, le trésor poétique de l’Occitanie. 2 vols. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justin Miller. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Library, Harvard University Press, 1916. Reprint, 1971. Ovide. De l’Amour: Les amours, L’art d’aimer, Les remèdes à l’amour. Translated by Olivier Sers. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2016. Pasquier, Étienne. Recherches de la France. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1990. Vol. 1, Part 2 (facsimile edition, Amsterdam, 1723). Il Petrarca. Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1545. Petrarca, Francesco. Canzoniere. Edited by Marco Santagata. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Revised, 2006.

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Petrarca, Francesco. Letters of Old Age. Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Petrarca, Francesco. Letters on Familiar Matters. Rerum familiarum libri. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo. 3 vols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975. Petrarca, Francesco. Selected Letters. Translated by Elaine Fantham. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Petrarca, Francesco. Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli Abbozzi. Edited by Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino, introduction by Marco Santagata. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Petrarca, Francesco. Triumphs. Translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics. Translated by Robert Durling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid. Foreword, notes, and translation collaboration by Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Schiavone, Valeria, ed. and trans. Corpus Hermeticum. Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Speroni, Sperone. Dialogo d’amore. Translated by Claude Gruget. Poitiers: La Licorne, 1998. Speroni, Sperone. Dialogue des langues. Translated by Gérard Genot and Paul Larivaille. Introduction and notes by Mario Pozzi. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance. Edited by Francis Goyet. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990. Tyard, Pontus de. Erreurs amoureuses. Edited by John A. McClelland. Geneva: Droz, 1967. Virgil. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I-VI. Translated by Henry Rushton Fairclough. Revised By George Patrick Goold. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Library, Harvard University Press, 1999.

Secondary Sources Abu-Haidar, J. A. Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics. Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon, 2001. Akehurst, F. R. P., and Judith M. Davis, eds. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Alduy, Cécile. Bibliographie des écrivains français: Maurice Scève. Rome: Memini, 2006. Alduy, Cécile. “Les ‘erreurs’ de la versification dans Délie de Maurice Scève.” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle 16.2 (1998): 249–66. Alduy, Cécile. “Délie palimpseste, ou l’art de la citation.” Studi Francesi 139 (2003): 23–38. Alduy, Cécile. “Scève et Pétrarque: ‘De mort à vie.’” In Les Poètes de la Renaissance française et Pétrarque, edited by Jean Balsamo, 157–70. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Alduy, Cécile. Politique des ‘Amours’: Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544–1560). Geneva: Droz, 2007. Allen, Michael J. B., and Valerie Rees, eds. Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

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Ardizzone, Maria Luisa. Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Ascoli, Albert Russell, and Unn Falkeid, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Auerbach, Erich. Dante, Poet of the Secular World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura,” translated by Ralph Mannheim. In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Pp. 11–71. Baker, Deborah Lasko. Narcissus and the Lover. Saratoga, CA: Stanford French and Italian Studies/Anma Libri, 1986. Balsamo, Jean. “L’italianisme lyonnais et l’illustration de la langue française,” in Lyon et l’illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance. Edited by Gérard Defaux. Lyon: École Normale Supérieure, 2003. Pp. 212–229. Balsamo, Jean, ed. Les poètes français de la Renaissance et Pétrarque. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Banks, Kathryn. Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and NaturalPhilosophical Poetry. London: Legenda, 2008. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., eds. Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Barbi, Michele. Dante nel Cinquecento. Pisa: Tip. T. Nistri, 1890. Reprint, Rome: Polla, 1975. Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Baur, Albert. Maurice Scève et la Renaissance lyonnaise. Paris: Champion, 1906. Bayat, Mojdeh, and Mohammad Ali Jamnia. Tales from the Land of the Sufis. Boston: Shambhala, 1994. Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d’encre: Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Bernardo, Aldo S. “Petrarch, Dante, and the Medieval Tradition.” In Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, edited by Albert Rabil, Jr., 115–37. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Bernardo, Aldo. “Petrarch’s Attitude Toward Dante.” PMLA 70.3 (1955): 488–517. Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Revised, 1997. Boase, Roger. The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. Bonnier, Xavier. “Mes silentes clameurs.” Métaphore et discours amoureux dans Délie de Maurice Scève. Paris: Champion, 2011. Botterill, Steven. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Boucher, Jacqueline. Lyon et la vie lyonnaise au XVIe siècle. Lyon: Éditions Lyonnaises d’Art et d’Histoire, 1992. Boutang, Pierre. Commentaire sur quarante-neuf dizains de la Délie. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Braden, Gordon. Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Briffault, Robert. The Troubadours. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Brownlee, Marina S., Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds. The New Medievalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

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Buron, Émmanuel, ed. Lectures de Délie de Maurice Scève. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012. Caesar, Michael, ed. Dante: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1989. Cassirer, Ernst. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Translated by Mario Domandi. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963. Cave, Terence. “Scève’s Délie: Correcting Petrarch’s Errors.” In Pre-Pléiade Poetry, edited by Jerry C. Nash, 112–24. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985. Céard, Jean. “Le temps et la mémoire dans Délie.” Europe, no. 691–92 (1986), 104–16. Celli, Andrea. Dante e l’oriente. Le fonti islamiche nella storiografia novecentesca. Rome: Carocci, 2013. Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Cerulli, Enrico. “Dante e l’Islam.” Al-Andalus 21 (1957): 229–53. Cerulli, Enrico. Il ‘Libro della scala’ e la questione delle fonti arabo-spagnole della “Divina Commedia.” Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1949. Charpentier, Françoise, ed. Dix etudes sur la Délie de Maurice Scève. Paris: École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 1987. Cherchi, Paolo. Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Cherchi, Paolo. Verso la chiusura: Saggio sul “Canzoniere” di Petrarca. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008. Chiamenti, Massimiliano. “The Representation of the Psyche in Cavalcanti, Dante and Petrarch: the Spiriti.” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 71–81. Clément, Michèle. “Scève, Dante et la valeur féminine dans Délie.” In L’unique change de scène. Écritures spirituelles et discours amoureux (XIIe–XVIIe siècle), edited by Véronique Ferrer, Barbara Marczuk, and Jean-René Valette, 231–46. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016. Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. The Gallo-Roman Muse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. An Illustrated Love “Canzoniere”: The Délie of Maurice Scève. Geneva: Slatkine, 1981. Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. Maurice Scève, Poet of Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Colonia, P. de. Histoire littéraire de la ville de Lyon. 2 vols. Lyon: Rigollet, 1728–30. Comte-Sponville, André. A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues. Translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Cool, Kenneth E. “Scève’s Agony of Expression and Petrarchan Discourse.” Stanford French Review 3 (1979): 193–210. Copleston, Frederick C. A History of Medieval Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Cornilliat, François. Or ne mens: Couleurs de l’éloge et du blâme chez les grands rhétoriqueurs. Paris: Champion, 1994. Cornilliat, François. Sujet caduc, noble sujet: La poésie de la Renaissance et le choix de ses arguments. Geneva: Droz, 2009. La Cort d’amor. Translated by Matthew Bardell. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. Croce, Benedetto. La poesia di Dante. Bari: Laterza, 1966. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated By Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.

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Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Le monde de l’imprimerie humaniste: Lyon.” In Histoire de l’édition française, edited by Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, with Jean-Pierre Vivet. Paris: Promodis, 1982. 303–335. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975. Dawson, John Charles. Toulouse in the Renaissance: Part I, the Floral Games of Toulouse (les Jeux floraux). New York: Columbia University Press, 1921. Defaux, Gérard, and Michel Simonin, eds. Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois” 1496–1996: Actes du colloque international de Cahors en Quercy 21–25 mai 1996. Paris: Champion, 1997. Defaux, Gérard. “(Re)visiting Délie: Maurice Scève and Marian Poetry.” Renaissance Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 685–739. DellaNeva, JoAnn. Song and Counter-Song: Scève’s Délie and Petrarch’s Rime. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983. DellaNeva, JoAnn. “Petrarchan Peregrinations in Scève’s Délie.” A French Forum: Mélanges de littérature française offerts à Raymond C. and Virginia A. La Charité. Paris: Klincksieck, 2000. 195–209. DellaNeva, JoAnn. “Scattered Rhymes: Petrarchan Fragments in Scève’s Délie 60.” French Studies 41:2 (1987), 129–40. DellaNeva, JoAnn. “The S(c)evered Intertext: Playfully Imitating Petrarch in the Délie.” Romance Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 195–202. Denomy, Alexander J. The Heresy of Courtly Love. New York: McMullen, 1947. Denomy, Alexander J. “An Inquiry into the Origins of Courtly Love.” Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 139–207. Di Girolamo, Costanzo. “Trobar clus e trobar lèu.” Medioevo Romanzo 8, no. 1 (1981–1983): 11–35. Di Scipio, Giuseppe C. The Presence of Pauline Thought in the Works of Dante. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Di Scipio, Giuseppe C. The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso. Ravenna: Longo, 1984. Donaldson-Evans, Lance. “‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’: Biblical Intertextualities in Scève’s Délie.” French Forum 14 (1989): 5–16. Doyle, Anthony Ian, Elizabeth Rainey, and Dudley B. Wilson. Manuscript to Print: Tradition and Innovation in the Renaissance Book. Durham: University of Durham Library, 1975. Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. 2nd edition. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Duval, Edwin M. “Articulation of the Délie: Emblems, Numbers, and the Book.” Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 65–75. Duval, Edwin M. “‘Comme Hecaté’: Mythography and the Macrocosm in an Epigramme by Maurice Scève.” BHR 40 (1979): 7–22. Eisenbichler, Konrad, and Amilcare A. Iannucci, eds. Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1990. Eisenbichler, Konrad, and Olga Zorzi Pugliese, eds. Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1986. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Miller, Jacqueline T. Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Minta, Stephen. Love Poetry in Sixteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. Minta, Stephen. Petrarch and Petrarchism: the English and French Traditions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Moevs, Christian. The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Moi, Toril. “Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love.” In Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, edited by David Aers, 11–33. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Moller, Herbert, “The Social Causation of the Courtly Love Complex.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1, no. 2 (January 1959): 137–63. Morgan, Alison. Dante and the Medieval Other World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Mourgues, Odette de. Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Nardone, Jean-Luc. Pétrarque et le Pétrarquisme. Paris: PUF “Que sais-je?”, 1998. Nash, Jerry C., ed. A Scève Celebration: Délie 1544–1994. Stanford French and Italian Studies, 77. Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1994. Nash, Jerry C. The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Nelli, René. L’Érotique des troubadours. Toulouse: Privat, 1963. Norton, Glyn, ed. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 3, The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Onians, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Ormerod, Beverly. “Scève’s Délie and the Mythographers’ Diana.” Studi Francesi 24 (1980): 86–93. Paden, William D. “Petrarch as a Poet of Provence.” Annali d’Italianistica 22 (2004): 19–44. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1937. Parker, Deborah. Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Paterson, Linda M. Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Perry, T. Anthony. Erotic Spirituality: The Integrative Tradition from Leone Ebreo to John Donne. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Pézard, André. Dante sous la pluie de feu. Paris: J. Vrin, 1950. Picot, E. Les Français italianisants au XVIe siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1906–7. Pivato, Joseph. “Maurice Scève’s Délie: Unpetrarchan and Hermetic.” Studi Francesi 79 (1983): 14–28. Richardson, Brian. Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Quignard, Pascal. La Parole de la Délie. Paris: Mercure de France, 1974. Raymond, Marcel. L’influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550–1585). Paris: Champion, 1927. Reprinted, 1965.

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Singleton, Charles S. An Essay on the Vita Nuova. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Skenazi, Cynthia. Maurice Scève et la pensée chrétienne. Geneva: Droz, 1992. Spence, Sarah. Rhetoric of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Spitzer, Leo. “L’amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours” (1944), In Études de Style, 81–133. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Staub, Hans. Le curieux désir: Scève et Peletier du Mans, poètes de la connaissance. Geneva: Droz, 1967. Sturm-Maddox, Sarah. Petrarch’s Laurels. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Sturm-Maddox, Sarah. Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime Sparse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Sturm-Maddox, Sarah. “Transformations of Courtly Love Poetry: Vita Nuova and Canzoniere.” In The Expansion and Transformations of Courtly Literature, edited by Nathaniel B. Smith and Joseph T. Snow, 128–40. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Tannahill, Reay. Sex in History. Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1992. Tanturli, Giuliano. “Il disprezzo per Dante dal Petrarca al Bruni.” Rinascimento 25 (1985): 199–219. Tetel, Marcel. Lectures Scéviennes. L’emblème et les mots. Paris: Klincksieck, 1983. The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Edited and translated by David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Thornton, Bruce S. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press (HarperCollins), 1997. Topsfield, Leslie T. Troubadours and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Trovato, Paolo. Dante in Petrarca: Per un inventario dei dantismi nei Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Florence: Olschki, 1979. Valency, Maurice. In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. Vallone, Aldo. Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo. 2 vols. Padua: Vallardi, 1981. Vianey, Joseph. Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVIe siècle. 1909. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969. Weber, Henri. La création poétique au XVIe siècle, de Maurice Scève à Agrippa d’Aubigné. Paris: Nizet, 1955. Weber, Henri. Le langage poétique de Maurice Scève dans la Délie. Florence: Institut Français de Florence, 1948. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1955. Wilson, Dudley B. French Renaissance and Scientific Poetry. London: Athlone Press, 1974. Wilson, Dudley B. “Remarks on Maurice Scève’s Délie.” Durham University Journal 29 (1967): 7–12. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 1968. Yandell, Cathy. Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Yates, Frances. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1947. Young, Wayland. Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

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Index Abelard, Peter 6 Aeneas 136, 140, 172, 180 Aeneid 32, 102, 124, 129, 136, 140, 153, 154, 160, 167, 170, 172, 173, 220 Andreas Capellanus 5, 10, 20, 73, 104, 152, 207, 234 Apollo 11, 13, 36, 97, 160, 165, 168, 169, 201, 218, 220, 227 Arion 37 Aristotle 21, 22, 86, 100, 101, 130, 180 Artemis 32, 89, 104, 161, 165 Augustine 1, 7, 14, 24, 75, 134, 136–138, 203, 204, 206, 207 Beatrice 5, 10, 11, 14, 21, 22, 25, 26, 31, 42, 50, 53, 54, 59, 79, 80, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 109–112, 114–117, 119, 120, 121–125, 134, 138–143, 145, 147, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176–179, 181, 182, 184–188, 196, 202–205, 207, 221, 227, 230, 233, 237, 242, 243, 245–249 Bembo, Pietro 10, 22, 23, 28, 38, 39, 56, 125, 130, 140, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 248 Bernart de Ventadorn 61, 63, 64, 94 Boccaccio, Giovanni 6, 12, 23, 24, 28, 32, 37, 39, 44, 73, 96, 120, 121, 127, 130, 131, 143, 146, 157, 177, 193, 197, 206, 220, 233 Cabestanh, Guilhem de 57–59, 63, 120, 121, 166, 181 Canzoniere 1, 2, 4–9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 25–27, 29, 30, 50, 53, 57, 69, 76, 99, 105, 112, 115, 125, 129, 133, 137, 139, 143, 146, 149, 168, 169, 174, 177, 181, 192–194, 196, 201–203, 205–210, 212, 213, 215, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 232, 233, 238, 239, 243, 245–249 Castiglione, Baldassare 56, 102, 104, 198 Catullus 41, 55, 89, 199, 245

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-012

Cavalcanti, Guido 10, 21, 29, 30, 45, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 90–95, 97–100, 103, 105–107, 109, 111, 116, 122, 124, 153, 188, 193, 196, 197, 201, 234, 243, 245–247, 249 Chrétien de Troyes 5, 45, 47 Cicero 35, 75, 102, 143, 196 Commedia 2, 3, 8–10, 12, 26, 28–30, 50, 53, 54, 56, 73, 75, 80, 97, 101, 103, 110, 114, 115, 116, 125, 128–131, 133, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 163–165, 168–171, 174, 175, 178, 180, 185–188, 203, 204, 216, 219–221, 227, 240, 242, 245, 249, 250 Convivio 4, 75, 76, 110, 111, 138, 180 Corbaccio 23, 206, 233 Corpus Hermeticum 35, 246 – Asclepius 48, 49, 246 Cupid 9, 20, 21, 48, 87, 111, 112, 168, 234, 235 Cupido 113, 229 Daniel, Arnaut 22, 27, 56, 57, 63, 110, 157, 169, 170, 201, 226, 227, 247 Daphne 13, 97, 168, 169, 212, 227 De amore (Commentarium in Convivium Platonis) 10, 50, 75–78, 80–86, 88, 90, 93, 95, 111, 152, 246 De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love) 5, 10, 20, 73, 95, 104, 152, 207 Decameron 6, 96, 120, 157, 187 Délie 5, 19, 24, 25, 31–33, 38, 42, 50, 51, 53, 58–60, 64, 68, 69, 72, 80, 83, 88, 89, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103–105, 110–112, 115–118, 120, 123, 126, 127, 133, 137–139, 141, 142, 144, 147–150, 152, 153, 155, 159–166, 168–177, 179, 180, 182–186, 188–190, 196, 197, 200, 203, 206, 210, 211, 214, 215, 221, 229–231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 240–243, 245, 246, 248–250

268

Index

Délie 1–4, 6–8, 10, 11, 13–15, 22, 26, 27, 30, 36–41, 44, 53, 56, 58, 59, 63, 64, 73, 78, 79, 86–88, 100, 105, 106, 110, 115, 117, 119, 112, 125, 133, 137, 139, 141, 145–148, 151, 152, 156, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 172, 175, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 191, 194, 199–201, 208–213, 215, 218, 219, 221–223, 228–231, 236, 240, 243, 245, 247, 249, 250 De vita solitaria 23, 206, 232, 233 De vulgari eloquentia 8, 10, 39, 57, 109, 110, 115, 174, 197, 245 Deplourable fin de Flamete, La 6, 36, 37 Diana 31, 32, 89, 104, 148, 161, 165, 213 Dictynna 89 Dido 55, 136, 140, 172, 173, 246 Diotima (Dyotime) 9, 26, 78, 86, 88, 89, 103, 176 Donna me prega 30, 76, 79–81, 91–94, 98, 106, 109, 153 Du Bellay, Joachim 5, 7–9, 16, 23, 28, 38, 39, 182, 191, 199–201, 212, 215, 217, 249 Du Guillet, Pernette 19–21, 26, 28, 30, 31, 37, 38, 64, 96, 102, 155 Ebreo, Leone (Léon Hébreu, or Leon Yehuda Abravanel) 11, 19, 26, 47, 79, 80, 246 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta 6, 37, 96 Éros 4, 6, 9, 47, 48, 87, 138 Ficino, Marsilio 10, 35, 50, 75–77, 78, 80–87, 88–97, 100, 106, 107, 109, 111, 121, 137, 144, 146, 152, 165, 198, 246 Fiore 47 Flamete 37 Folquet de Marseille 174 Fontaine, Charles 10, 31, 246 Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods) 32, 143, 146, 177, 206, 220 Giraut (or Guiraut) de Bornelh 57, 63 Glaucus 176, 177, 246, 250 Guilhem de Peiteus 21

Guinizzelli, Guido 56, 105, 113–115, 152, 184, 185, 195, 201, 204, 231, 232, 234, 239, 245, 249 Guittone d’Arezzo 27, 57, 114, 137, 201 Hecate 31, 32, 89, 98, 147–149, 155 Héloïse 6 Hesiod 31, 84, 86, 143 Homer 84, 159, 160, 216 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 183, 196, 197, 223 Labé, Louise 19, 28, 37, 139 Landino, Cristoforo 10, 29, 75, 77, 127, 130, 170, 182, 226 Laura 5, 11, 14, 25, 26, 31, 33, 34, 50, 53, 66, 69, 70, 85, 89, 98, 104, 105, 112, 116, 118, 133–134, 137–139, 158, 174, 181, 183, 191, 195, 196, 198, 201–207, 210–214, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227, 230, 232–235, 237, 240, 241, 245, 248–250 Limbo 150, 151, 196, 250 Lucretius 143 Marguerite de Navarre 78, 130, 137, 170 Marot, Clément 8, 13, 16, 35, 36, 38, 60, 68, 79, 82, 88, 100, 198, 215–218, 231, 245 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 109, 131, 139, 182, 197 Microcosme 13, 36, 38, 133, 164 Ovid 16, 20, 32, 37, 41, 55, 91, 137, 141, 143, 160, 169, 174, 177, 195, 213, 214, 217, 227, 242, 245, 250 Paradiso 47, 65, 123, 142, 167, 177, 178, 180, 186 Pasquier, Estienne 23, 32, 33, 39, 40, 63, 217 Plato 9, 10, 35, 65, 72, 75–78, 81, 84–86, 89, 91, 92, 97, 101, 103, 112, 130, 167, 246 Plotinus 35, 76–78, 85, 91, 92 Prometheus 118–120, 143–146, 206 Propertius 32, 41, 143, 195, 210, 215, 245 Purgatorio 54, 123, 138, 165, 166, 169, 220, 247

Index

Quintilian 102, 125, 196, 216, 222 Raimbaut d’Aurenga 63, 64 Rime petrose 8, 10, 27, 90, 96–98, 105, 114, 123–127, 149, 154, 234 Roman de la rose 5, 10, 20, 22, 36, 45–47, 60, 65, 68, 69, 72–74, 95, 104, 120, 157, 192, 195, 198–200, 234 Ronsard, Pierre de 8, 9, 13, 23, 36, 39, 139, 182, 191, 199, 201, 209, 215, 236 Rouillé (or Roville), Guillaume 19, 29, 31, 246 Rudel, Jaufre 63, 191, 201 Saulsaye, La 37 Sébillet, Thomas 16, 28, 39, 101, 199 Secretum 25, 69, 134, 139, 227, 232, 248 Seneca 75, 196 Socrates 9, 26, 78, 89, 103, 176 Song of Songs (Canticum canticorum) 48, 49, 50, 54, 59, 136 Sordello 27, 57, 120 (as Sordel) Speroni, Sperone 16, 39, 47, 56, 75, 86, 88, 89, 125 Tibullus 27, 32, 41, 55, 245 Tournes, Jean de 9, 29, 30, 76, 92, 111, 246

269

Triumphi 1, 4, 7, 8, 26, 30, 57, 76, 83, 129, 143, 146, 192, 193, 197, 200–202, 215, 230, 246 Triumphus cupidinis 56, 57, 83, 114, 148, 162, 177, 191, 201 Triumphus eternitatis 139, 202 Triumphus pudicitie 83, 168 Triumphus temporis 155, 183 Tyard, Pontus de 30, 39, 79, 199 Vellutello 56, 127, 130 Venus 48, 67, 69, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 112, 146, 160, 170, 172, 179, 189, 201, 216, 229, 234, 236 Vergil (Roman poet) 16, 72, 102, 124, 129, 131, 136, 140, 153, 154, 159, 167, 170, 172, 173, 217, 220 Virgil (Dante's guide) 98, 103, 129, 139, 142, 147, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159, 165, 171, 174, 175, 185–187, 204, 207, 247 Vita nuova 6, 8, 10, 21, 22, 26, 27, 45, 53, 54, 59, 64, 96, 97, 100–102, 109, 110–112, 115–123, 138, 140, 143, 145, 149–151, 159, 163, 165, 168, 170, 187, 192, 193, 196, 197, 203–205, 213, 227, 230, 242, 245, 247, 250

Index of poems and cantos cited Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (Divine Comedy) Inferno Inf. 1: 148, 175, 227 Inf. 2: 98, 147, 153, 181 Inf. 3: 64, 127, 152, 154, 238 Inf. 4: 147, 158 Inf. 5: 44, 124 Inf. 9: 106, 127 Inf. 10: 32, 147 Inf. 14: 167 Inf. 20: 241 Inf. 24: 149 Inf. 26: 241 Inf. 28: 57 Inf. 30: 115 Inf. 34: 127

Purgatorio Purg. 6: 57 Purg. 7: 57 Purg. 8: 57, 169 Purg. 9: 219 Purg. 11: 115 Purg. 15: 227 Purg. 17: 204 Purg. 19: 158 Purg. 22: 142, 152, 165, 171 Purg. 25: 149, 169 Purg. 26: 56, 57, 114, 115, 159, 169, 184, 201, 226, 247 Purg. 27: 169, 175, 207 Purg. 29: 31, 101, 165, 170, 233 Purg. 30: 50, 54, 138–141, 147, 170, 186, 187, 203, 249 Purg. 33: 155, 185

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513596-013

Paradiso Par. 1: 177 Par. 2: 167, 170, 177, 179 Par. 3: 178 Par. 6: 175 Par. 8: 73 Par. 10: 110, 151, 165 Par. 21: 115 Par. 26: 140, 142 Par. 27: 141, 186 Par. 30: 181 Par. 32: 152 Par. 33: 169, 179, 181, 221

Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) Rvf 1: 194, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 215, 225–231, 241 Rvf 2: 105 Rvf 23: 201, 227, 235 Rvf 29: 105 Rvf 35: 60, 213 Rvf 37: 202 Rvf 40: 98 Rvf 41: 168 Rvf 44: 88, 99 Rvf 58: 238 Rvf 70: 57, 76, 192, 201, 250 Rvf 72: 181 Rvf 81: 203 Rvf 86: 203 Rvf 115: 51, 206 Rvf 125: 89, 125 Rvf 126: 213, 214, 236 Rvf 127: 191 Rvf 129: 125 Rvf 134: 234

272

Index of poems and cantos cited

Rvf 135: 149, 231 Rvf 152: 117, 147 Rvf 164: 234 Rvf 185: 149, 231 Rvf 189: 239–241 Rvf 191: 181 Rvf 207: 174, 243 Rvf 208: 218 Rvf 210: 149, 231 Rvf 211: 70, 71, 162 Rvf 235: 240 Rvf 264: 60, 174, 182, 213, 237 Rvf 287: 201 Rvf 291: 220, 232 Rvf 321: 149, 231 Rvf 323: 149, 231 Rvf 358: 94 Rvf 366: 5, 51, 118, 125, 139, 174, 181, 203, 213, 214, 241

Scève’s Délie huitain 87, 99, 112–113, 115, 145, 154–155, 160, 168–169, 229–231, 236, 240 D 1: 58, 59, 79, 100, 116, 118, 211, 213, 215, 230, 231, 242 D 2: 141, 144, 150, 186 D 3: 116–120, 122, 123, 133, 142, 145, 147, 153 D 4: 164, 180 D 5: 120 D 6: 88 D 7: 99, 116, 142 D 11: 133 D 12: 88 D 13: 79, 115, 119, 149 D 16: 58, 151, 214 D 17: 123 D 18: 236 D 22: 98, 147–149 D 23: 171, 242 D 24: 25 D 27: 59 D 34: 242 D 41: 82, 88 D 43: 90 D 44: 116

D 45: 93 D 48: 148 D 58: 133 D 59: 166 D 60: 99 D 65: 63, 71 D 69: 238 D 71: 93, 94 D 77: 118, 133, 143–146, 200 D 82: 179 D 94: 146, 151, 228, 246 D 109: 160, 173 D 114: 109, 155, 172 D 118: 155 D 125: 126, 127, 133 D 131: 32 D 133: 110, 170 D 134: 179 D 142: 72 D 143: 155 D 146: 72 D 149: 133, 146 D 152: 110, 236, 237 D 159: 32, 234 D 160: 159, 161 D 161: 51, 88, 104, 159, 161, 206 D 163: 117 D 164: 239, 240 D 166: 188 D 173: 166 D 175: 148 D 176: 31 D 179: 159 D 182: 146, 189 D 192: 238 D 194: 98 D 196: 176, 233 D 197: 89 D 200: 156 D 224: 213 D 226: 213 D 228: 143, 162 D 230: 238 D 235: 213, 214 D 236: 213, 214, 234 D 239: 236 D 240: 133, 155

Index of poems and cantos cited

D 244: D 248: D 250: D 254: D 255: D 256: D 285: D 289: D 297: D 302: D 305: D 309: D 314: D 324: D 330: D 337: D 344: D 346: D 355: D 356: D 358: D 361: D 367: D 370: D 376:

59 60 32 170 170, 179 62 29 156 183 120 150, 237 90, 234, 235 133 133 163 92 176 123 220 120, 167, 219, 220 126 140 115, 166, 188, 190 238 149

273

D 377: 171, 172, 174 D 379: 100 D 388: 170, 210, 211, 216, 220 D 392: 179, 180 D 393: 241 D 396: 149 D 397: 150, 238 D 398: 117 D 408: 234 D 409: 133 D 410: 71 D 413: 218, 219 D 417: 11, 201, 210, 218, 220 D 420: 69, 70 D 424: 79 D 428: 88 D 434: 151 D 435: 86, 89 D 436: 25, 89, 149, 176, 177, 186 D 439: 88, 89 D 445: 133, 155 D 446: 234 D 447: 148, 180 D 449: 42, 66, 148, 156, 168, 181–186, 188, 213, 215, 221, 230