Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

By Teodolinda Barolini

In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social.

The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated.

Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823227051

Teodolinda Barolini

Teodolinda Barolini is the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and author of a number of books, including The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante and Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy.”

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Introduction

Reading Against the Grain:

Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal

One of the great pleasures of gathering my essays is the opportunity afforded, by looking back, to chart the maze and find its principles of order. The pillars of my critical praxis stand clear in the light of retrospection. One is the importance of learning from the reception, frequently with the goal of demystifying and deinstitutionalizing viewpoints that have been given too much credence and authoritative weight by centuries of repetition. Perhaps this attitude was born in response to working on a text, Dante’s Commedia, which has produced masses of repetitive exegesis since the fourteenth century, and in the context of a culture—Italian—that invests excessively in the authority of tradition and indeed in the authority of authority itself. As a young scholar I conceived it my duty to learn what had been written, to wade through many commentaries and lecturae. Ultimately I learned not only to value the rare acuity of the fourteenth-century commentator Benvenuto da Imola or the acerbic wit of Ludovico Castelvetro in the sixteenth century but also how to learn from even the most repetitive and least original contributions—which involved less attention to the content of what was said, which had usually been said before, than to the fact of these commentaries’ existence. This authority-laden exegetical tradition taught me that a poet who takes God as his guarantor, like the poet of the Commedia, could generate a commentary tradition, and then exert a pull on his commentators not so dissimilar from that of the Bible. I responded by wanting to study and understand the modalities of how Dante went about constructing an authorial voice that could exert such control, a response that took me first in the direction of intertextuality in Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy and then of narrative theory in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.¹

As the years went by I became ever more actively interested in understanding the cultural ground that produced not only Dante himself but also the interaction between Dante and his readers. The commentary tradition to the Commedia is an interactive cultural phenomenon that will repay greater study. There are many questions we might ask: for instance, when Dante omits names from his narratives, as in the story of Francesca in Inferno 5, which names only one protagonist in the celebrated adulterous triangle, and that one only by her Christian name, does he expect commentators to fill in the blanks? Sticking with Inferno 5, we might also wonder: when Dante has Francesca say Caina attende chi a vita ci spense (Caina awaits the one who took our life) (Inf. 5.107),² is he deliberately building in the need for commentators who will tell readers that Caina is the zone of lower hell reserved for traitors of family? The first-time reader of Inferno 5 could conceivably have the classical erudition to know who Minos and Dido and the other classical figures in the canto are, and could perhaps—if Dante’s contemporaries—have knowledge of Francesca and her scandal and murder, but no reader could have known what Caina is, since it is part of the textual world that Dante invents. This is one of Dante’s subliminal strategies for constructing authority: he treats his fictional otherworld as though real by dropping a proper name—this time Caina, later Malebolge³—into the narrative without explanation. It is subliminal in the sense that it has gone unremarked. Commentators jumped in to gloss Caina as they jumped in to furnish the absent names of Francesca’s husband and lover brother-in-law, but they did not comment on the underlying strategy of being compelled to gloss a fictional place as though it were real.

The Commedia’s authority is centered on its truth claims, again a culturally fractious issue that raises the question of the reader’s religious beliefs. There are complex cultural factors indisposing Italian scholars from objectivity regarding the Commedia’s truth claims: either, as believers, they are incapable of taking Dante’s prophetic pretensions at face value, since such claims can only be properly made by real (biblical) prophets; or, as lapsed believers, and frequently converts to a militant secularism, they do not want to. At the same time, a very Italian cultural willingness to accommodate the idea of fiction (along with a Catholic willingness to accommodate commentators and glossators, the students of the Decretals whom Dante so scorns) was perhaps also a factor in the persistent view of Dante as poet rather than truth-teller. This willingness has abetted critical confusion by positing an unnecessary either/or between poet and truth-teller that has persisted to this day.

Dante’s readers have, on the whole, always been able and willing to distinguish between a poet and a prophet, and they have categorized him as a poet. In fact, for all that Dante’s early commentators felt the need to protect their poet from the charge of heresy by insisting on allegory and devaluing his truth claims, it is worth noting that Dante never succeeded in eliciting the attention from the fourteenth-century Italian Church that in our times the novelist Salman Rushdie elicited from the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Hoping to persuade the Ayatollah to take his text less seriously, Rushdie pointed to its artifactuality, but the Iranian mullah held that manipulations of narrative voice and other rhetorical techniques offer an author no protective veil. This is not to say that the fourteenth-century Italian Church was not capable of harsh responses. In 1327, six years after Dante’s death, the Italian astrologer, mathematician, and physician, Cecco d’Ascoli, was burned at the stake. But Cecco did not have the cover of being a great poet, a supreme deployer of narrative voice and fictional tropes. Rather he was an astrologer and medical doctor who used the means of narrative verse in L’Acerba to propogate his views. In "Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition," I argue that Dante, who considered himself not a decretalist but a new St. John, wanted to be taken more seriously as a prophet and visionary than Italian culture was prepared to take him: he saw himself as a poet, yes, but also as a teller of truth, a combination that was difficult for his cultural milieu to accept then, and remains difficult to accept today.

Interestingly, and a further reflection of the workings of the Italian cultural imaginary, the canny insertion of a compelling secular story line into the Commedia’s secolare commento—the centuries-long commentary tradition that is the backbone of the Commedia’s reception—could also command acritical acceptance: this is the case, for instance, of Boccaccio’s novelistic rewriting of Dante’s story of Francesca in Inferno 5. Picked up by subsequent commentators, the melodramatic tale of the great raconteur has achieved canonical status and has utterly contaminated the reception of the canto. In Boccaccio’s tale Fran-cesca’s free agency, which is what is most at stake for Dante (making Dante, by the way, quite progressive from the perspective of gender, as I show in Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender, where I also discuss the commentary tradition and Boccaccio’s wholesale infiltration of it), is put aside: she is effectively innocent of any misdeed, since her father deceives her into wedlock with the ugly Gianciotto through the use of the handsome Paolo as a proxy for his brother. The active cultivation of Boccaccio’s romance by commentators who repeat his story to this day is a good example of the sometimes willful nature of the exegetical tradition: when a good (love) story is involved, more austere versions of the tale will be eclipsed. Dante is a great poet of silence—Francesca’s quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante (that day we read no more) (Inf. 5.138) is speech devoted to closing off the avenues of speech—whose haunting ellipses have been systematically filled in by a commentary tradition that craves a voyeuristic level of color and detail denied it by their poet.

A tabloid-like voyeurism not infrequently seems to drive the Italian critical tradition. Most startlingly, Petrarch’s extremely austere version of his own life and love story as chastely narrated in his lyric sequence (known as the Canzoniere but named by him Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Vernacular Fragments]) was rewritten by commentators who—despite the existence of a manuscript authored and authorized by the author himself—added the rubrics in vita di Madonna Laura and in morte di Madonna Laura as headings to the two parts of the poetry collection. In this way narrative mechanisms explicitly relating to the life and death of Laura that are not part of the author’s vision are imported into the text by the commentators.

Just when a little respect for authority would have come in handy, then, other forces gained the upper hand. It shocked me that Petrarch’s own authorial wishes were overwritten first by the need to craft a dramatic narrative of the poet’s life that could more easily be parsed and digested by his readers (in his edition of 1514, Bembo, who possessed the autograph manuscript, moved the beginning of part 2 of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta from canzone 264, where it had been placed by Petrarch, to sonnet 267, the first to proclaim Laura dead, thus accommodating the already existing in vita / in morte rubrics of previous editors), and then by an overwhelming—almost religious—sense of obligation to a tradition whose accretions could not be altered. The tenacity of the tradition is such that, even after Mestica moved the beginning of part 2 back to canzone 264 in his 1896 edition, Carducci and Ferrari do not dare to follow him in their edition of 1899: Non osammo seguirlo [Mestica], tenuti dal rispetto alla quasi religiosa consuetudine (We did not dare to follow him [Mestica], held by respect for a custom of almost religious proportions).⁴ Petrarch invented the lyric sequence because as a genre it allowed him to engage metaphysical realities: the Self-in-Love really interests him only as the Self-in-Love-in-Time. As a result he deliberately set out to achieve the tenuous and opaque narrativity that is this genre’s hallmark, a narrativity I examine in detail in "The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta." The audience’s desire for vivid and dramatic narrative trumps Petrarch’s metaphysical quest.

The dialectic between a strong and austere metaphysical bent and an elegiac desire to cherish and caress the things of earth, embodied and historical, is, it seems to me, the abiding characteristic of the Italian cultural imaginary. The anti-metaphysical is beautifully expressed by the words of the Prince in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel, Il Gattopardo: Potremo magari preoccuparci per i nostri figli, forse per i nipotini; ma al di là di quanto possiamo sperare di accarezzare con queste mani non abbiamo obblighi (We can maybe worry for our children, for our grandchildren, but beyond what we can hope to caress with these hands we have no obligations).⁵ But the metaphysical trait is also supremely present, and not just in overtly theological works like Dante’s: the hero of Lampedusa’s novel is an amateur astronomer who spends much of life gazing upward at the stars. A dialectically composed trait, which I have dubbed una metafisica artigianale—an artisanal metaphysics⁶—there is a tendency to flatten it toward one or the other of its two components in considerations of Italian culture, much as Dante is flattened into either poeta or theologus. I believe that in this sense Dante and the critical tradition he has spawned are profoundly reflective of Italian culture as a whole. The degree to which I believe that Dantean philology and literary history reflect Italy and her travails will be apparent to the reader of the essay Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis.

Italian culture is somewhat heavy—pesante—in its attention to authority and its reflexive genuflections to the past. At the same time, conventionality is not a feature of the great Italian poets and writers I discuss here. From Guinizzelli’s willingness to challenge God on the subject of the beauty of ladies to Cavalcanti’s radical distrust in any comforting belief system, from Dante’s appropriation of God’s perspective to the imaginative freedom that allows Petrarch to make Laura alive after she is dead: these authors share a genuine iconoclasm, a lightness (leggerezza), in Calvino’s happy expression. Calvino is borrowing from Boccaccio’s description of Cavalcanti in Decameron 6.9, where Guido leaps over a tomb and evades his tormentors sì come colui che leggerissimo era (as one who was very light). This lightness—l’agile salto improvviso del poeta-filosofo che si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo (the agile sudden leap of the poet-philosopher who lifts himself above the heaviness of the world)—which Calvino takes as his hopeful symbol for our present millennium, is also an invigorating emblem for the Italian cultural dialectic.⁷ All these authors share an authentic lightness. Indeed, in many ways my long resistance to thinking of myself as an Italianist (as a young scholar, I self-identified as a medievalist) has mutated into a desire to be an Italianist whose mission is to free these authors from the heavy weight of traditional encrustations and restore them to their most authentic—light—selves. The vehemence of my response to Domenico De Robertis’s edition of Dante’s lyrics certainly reflects my sense that the eminent philologist has reconsigned Dante to the tradition from which, if anything, it is our job to wrest him.

Many times while traveling in Italy I have had the opportunity to speak with young people whose reaction when I have told them I am a Dante scholar—a dantista—has been a variant of Dante, what a bore! Because I believe in learning from the reception of a text—in order then to unlearn it and to see more clearly the warpings produced by time—I have meditated at length on this response and have come to the conclusion that it is an understandable position vis-à-vis an author who has been systematically appropriated by both church and state. The Dante whom I know—nonconformist and intellectually independent to a fault—has been tamed and made boring by centuries of institutional appropriation: he has been submerged both by nationalism, which has used him as an emblem of the coherence and unity of a state that was for centuries fragmented and incoherent, and by the Catholic Church, which has used him as a conduit for its official dogma. This cultural appropriation, which has little interest in Dante’s personal theological vision—a theological vision that, as I reconstruct it in Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell, is made from disparate cultural elements both high and low, from religious opinions both orthodox and not—can be glimpsed for instance in the article Inferno in the Enciclopedia Cattolica, where there are citations from Inferno 3 mixed in with the theology of St. Thomas.⁸ Reading this article, one would never guess the heterodoxy of Dante’s inventio in Inferno 3, which features an utterly idiosyncratic vestibule of hell to house two groups not recognized by theologians, the neutral angels who took no side in Lucifer’s rebellion and human souls who did not commit themselves fully to good or to evil. Suggesting that commitment even to evil is preferable to no commitment at all, Vergil tells us that these creatures are accepted neither in heaven nor in hell: Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli, / né lo profondo inferno li riceve (The heavens drive them out in order not to be less beautiful, nor does deep hell receive them) (Inf. 3.40–41).

Generations of Italians do not know that Dante is profoundly heterodox in his religious opinions! In his papal encyclical In praeclara summorum of 30 April 1921, published for the sixth centenary of Dante’s death, Pope Benedict XV praises Dante for accepting Sacred Scripture with perfect docility and urges that he may be for the pupils the teacher of Christian doctrine.⁹ It can hardly be surprising that under these circumstances Italy’s youth do not love their greatest poet. They revere him, but they do not love him.

Italy’s greatest poet is more appreciated by young readers outside of Italy than within her, a fact that suggests a profound loss: the icon to national unity and Christian certainty was bought at the cost of authentic cultural patrimony and identity. Italians should know that if there is a spirit that disdains conventions and smug certitudes it is Dante’s, the poet who questions God’s justice right up to the threshold of the beatific vision. Dante does not simply accept things as they are. Rather, he places adult virtuous pagans in limbo despite there being no theological justification for such a placement (theologians placed only unbaptized infants in limbo, the Hebrew righteous having been freed from limbo by Christ’s harrowing of hell). In heaven he is still struggling against the injustice of damning a virtuous person who happens to be born outside of the bounds of Christianity, chronologically in the case of the virtuous pagans of antiquity, or geographically in the case of Dante’s contemporaries who live on the banks of the Indus (Par. 19.70–71). This is the Dante that we must give back to Italian readers for whom he has been domesticated and tamed beyond all recognition.

The essays in this volume were published over a twenty-two-year span, from 1983 to 2005, although the majority—twelve of the sixteen—belong to the period after the publication of The Undivine Comedy in 1992. Collectively this work deals with the literary culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, especially in the figures of its lyric poets and its three crowns: Dante (1265–1321), Petrarch (1304–74), and Boccaccio (1313–75). The volume leads off with the important contributions of Dante’s thirteenth-century Italian lyric precursors in Dante and the Lyric Past, featuring the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini, the Tuscan Guittone d’Arezzo, the Bolognese Guido Guinizzelli, and the Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, but also others not well known outside of the Italian scholarly community. These poets played a key role in shaping the cultural and ideological context from which the Commedia would later spring, a context to which I allude in the heading A Philosophy of Desire. The first three essays in this volume establish this context. One of the lyric poets in question is Dante himself, whose own lyric past is in my view a largely untapped aquifer for understanding the Commedia. Dante’s lyric poems are truly the ideological wellsprings of his mature work, in ways that I explore here and will explore further in my commentary to these poems for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli.¹⁰

Foremost among Dante’s lyrics in its ideological relevance to the Commedia is the mature canzone Doglia mi reca, whose philosophical depth has solicited much of my attention. "Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire" use the lyric springboard to establish Dante as a poet of desire in a holistic paradigm that embraces not only Doglia mi reca and other lyrics but also the extraordinary parable of life’s journey as a ladder of increasing desires—from an apple, to a little bird, to beautiful clothing, to a horse, to a woman, to wealth, and then to greater and greater wealth—that Dante outlines in his prose treatise Convivio, in a passage that I read as a template for the Commedia. This paradigm, which reaches back to Dante’s lyric origins and forward to the Commedia’s Ulyssean thematic of desire as transgression, is grounded theoretically in my book The Undivine Comedy, to which the essay "Guittone’s Ora parrà" furnishes a prehistory that is then further elaborated in "Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context." Not coincidentally, the Convivio’s incremental ladder of desire and the philosophy—and poetics—of desire to which it is anchored is invoked also in Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell, which treats the philosophical and theological antecedents of Dante’s paradigm.

Dante’s interaction with other traditions—hence multiculturalism—has been an abiding interest of mine, going back to my first book, Dante’s Poets, which considers the significance of all the poets (classical as well as vernacular, epic as well as lyric) whom Dante places in his afterworld. When I use multicultural to refer to the eclectic fusion of intellectual and ideological traditions deriving from different times and places, although current usage of the term refers almost exclusively to historical co-presence and interaction of widely various ethnic communities, I do so deliberately, in order to suggest that Dante’s vertical syncretism is just as radical in its own time and place as the horizontal variety we practice today. I strongly believe that Dante’s interactions with classical culture are remarkably prehumanist, in ways that have profound implications for a historiography that has traditionally placed Dante at the end of the Middle Ages and Petrarch at the beginning of the Renaissance.

Moreover, as I have already suggested, Dante’s heterodox and problematized thinking on the subject of who will be saved and who will be damned operates horizontally as well—along a geographical axis in the world as he knew it: his concern for justice embraces not only the saved pagans revealed with great fanfare in Paradiso 20, but also the Ethiopian who will be saved when many Christians will be damned (Par. 19.109–11). This is absolutely not to say that Dante was immune from the blind spots of his time or that his poem is without historical stain: for a painful demonstration of a deep stain, we need only read Sylvia Tomasch’s discussion of "Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew."¹¹ Tomasch’s use of the The Undivine Comedy in her essay exemplifies what that book is most fundamentally about: I was trying to create a framework of readerly resistance that would allow us to get beyond the Commedia’s masterful self-presentation, and it was deeply gratifying to me—as someone who has not written on the ethnic communities of the Commedia (in the case of the Jews an absent community, since, as Tomasch writes, "the whole of the Commedia does not include even one postbiblical Jew")—to learn from another scholar who used that programmatic resistance to go in directions that I certainly did not explicitly foresee.¹²

There is no doubt that Dante took pains to contend with—and felt pain with respect to—the historical difference that is embedded in the past, and specifically in classical culture. There is, in my opinion, much more work to be done on this topic. I still strongly endorse what I wrote in Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid in 1989: I am concerned that our insistence on Dante’s corrections of classical antiquity, which began as an attempt to replace impressionistic critical enthusiasms with a more rigorous assessment of the poem’s intertextuality, now risks binding the text’s paradoxes in a straitjacket of medieval orthodoxy that is every bit as confining and impoverishingly unilateral. In this volume, my contributions to this ongoing discussion are found under the heading Christian and Pagan Intertexts, which is intended to pick up from Medieval Multiculturalism and to suggest again the indiscriminate mixing of cultural and ideological programs—past and present, high and low, pagan and Christian—that is Dante’s specific hallmark.

The classical tradition and Dante’s relation to it are explored in the essays "Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–433 and Inferno 5.1–24), Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question, and Arachne, Argus, and St. John" (whose very title signals my early interest in the fusion of classical with Christian inter-texts). The first two situate Vergilian intertextual issues in a narratological frame, probing the enterprise of writing a true fiction against the backdrop of writing the great testament to the lacrimae rerum, and the third considers Dante’s Ovidian intertextuality within the context of the visionary tradition and what I believe to be Dante’s assessment of Ovid as in some deep way, mutatis mutandis, a visionary comrade. I conclude this last essay by noting that while Dante’s use of Vergil diminishes over the course of the Commedia, his use of Ovid increases: "The book that does justice to Dante’s escalating use of Ovid as the poet of transgression and metamorphosis in all senses, from the sexual to the supreme sense of trasumanar, has yet to be written." This sentence, which I wrote at the time of putting together this volume, reflects my mature convictions that 1) Ovid is insufficiently appreciated as a philosopher-poet who probed all boundaries, all identities, all comings into being and goings from it, and that 2) Dante was a great reader of Ovid who did understand him in precisely this way, an understanding that is retrievable from his systematic use of Ovid throughout Paradiso, culminating in the extraordinary image of Neptune’s amazement at looking up and seeing the shadow of the first ship on the hitherto unsullied surface of the sea.

Reinstating Dante into the history of the visionary tradition, rather than isolating him on a high-culture peak of literary and poetic greatness, has been a part of my critical effort since The Undivine Comedy. The work I began there—the work of considering the structure and meaning of hell, purgatory, and paradise as historicized ideas and Dante’s specific place within and contribution to that history of ideas—is further developed in essays included here, especially in Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell and "Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition. However, my commitment to using the visions, not in the way of nineteenth-century positivism and its search for Dante’s sources, but as a powerful lens for interpreting Dante’s choices, is apparent also in Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love)," where I use the treatment of lust in Tundale’s Vision and Thurkill’s Vision to show that Dante’s psychological handling of lust is anomalous. We have no way of understanding the cultural anomaly of Inferno 5 (or any other part of the Commedia for that matter) unless we place Dante’s choices within an enriched historical context.

Some fraction of an enriched historical context for Inferno 5 and especially for the canto’s protagonist is what I tried to reconstruct in Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender, an essay that grapples with the question of Francesca’s gender and what value to assign to it. The essays on gender in this volume are arranged in the order in which they were written (the last two contain much previously unpublished material). They constitute stepping stones in an argument, ultimately laid out in "Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax" according to which the progressive strand of early Italian letters was constituted not by the beautiful, courtly, Platonizing poetry for which it is famous but by didactic, moralizing, and not always beautiful works that yet treat women as moral agents. To come to an appreciation of the progressive nature of obnoxiously paternalistic canzoni like Guittone’s Altra fiata and Dante’s Doglia mi reca I had to read against the grain of my own first responses: my marginal comment to Doglia mi reca from 1976 reads Of all Dante’s lyrics, the most ‘medieval’ in its approach to women. In "Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli), I look in particular at canzoni in which Guittone and Dante address a female audience and instruct their women interlocutors, referred to by Dante as those beneath a head covering: sotto benda. A contemporary historical reference point is provided by Cecco d’Ascoli, who cites Dante’s sotto benda in order to mount a scornful attack on Dante’s belief that women can be taught. On the spectrum between literature and history, Dante and Francesca da Rimini" is the most historical of these essays while "Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10)," which takes its point of departure from a proverb, is the most focused on decoding fourteenth-century rhetoric. But rhetoric and language are always already historicized, and history is imbricated with rhetoric and language (as exemplified in the Francesca essay by historians who cite Trecento commentators on the Commedia when glossing the vicissitudes of Italian factional politics), so the demarcation here is hardly clear.

When I wrote my disparaging marginal note on Doglia mi reca, I still (being young and from a certain kind of almost romantically intellectual family background) reflexively assumed the superiority of the Platonizing current of Italian letters. As time passed, I came to appreciate more the empirical, and indeed I have come to see the mature Dante of the Paradiso as philosophically a unique blend of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic—empirical and mystical—elements. One of the tasks of future Dante scholarship, in my view, will be to untie the Paradiso’s intellectual knots one by one, revealing each one to be a unique and utterly idiosyncratic blend of philosophical elements. Most importantly, I have come to see Dante as profoundly not dualistic, which may be why he was able to view women as interlocutors as well as emanations of the divine. Dante’s unified theory of desire has not fared well in the critical reception, perhaps because unified theories of desire seem in general to withstand with difficulty what seems to be an almost instinctive human reversion to moral Manichaeism. The particular local dualisms dear to dantisti—poeta versus theologus, amore corporale versus amore spirituale—will I hope one day be as outdated as a rigidly conceived body/soul dualism has become among cultural and religious historians of the Middle Ages.¹³ Similarly, another fundamental binary, woman/man, may turn out to have been more flexibly construed by Dante than we had supposed. Dualisms attract him—body versus soul, love versus intellect, Francis versus Dominic, Aristotelianism versus Neoplatonism, differentiation versus oneness, form versus content—precisely as that which requires integration, in a process that must be accomplished with nuance, detail, specificity, and difference preserved and intact.

Dante’s poetic identity is founded on this double-pronged need: the need to uncover aporias and dualisms and the need to reconcile them, through paradox and metaphor. One could say of Dante what he says of love in his canzone Doglia mi reca, that to him was given the power to make one out of two: e a costui [fu dato] di due poter un fare (14). Reason and appetite are constants of our identities; the goal—and the challenge—is to keep them unified and aligned. Dante’s mature treatment of women tracks his mature conception of desire, which is not dualistic, for it is not appetite that is bad or good, but how we direct it. According to this viewpoint, desire is neither completely intellectualized nor completely subrational, but a continuum that embraces both extremes. By the same token, women for Dante are not located at one pole or the other, Beatrice or femmina balba, but are ultimately somewhere much more complex—and human—in between: Francesca, Pia, Piccarda.

If we use women as a gauge with respect to Petrarch, we find him to be less open and more threatened, as befits a poet whose view of desire is fundamentally dualistic. Not surprisingly (although to my knowledge never previously observed), the Platonizing poetry of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta does not embrace moral poems that address women like those of Guittone and Dante. Petrarch’s anxiety toward women is perfectly expressed in his regressive traslatio of Boccaccio’s story of Griselda. Nor is he truly a love poet, as Dante is; Petrarch is fundamentally a metaphysical poet, directing his eros and yearning toward a dimension in which the dualisms that beset him and that he cannot heal will be healed by a higher power.

The essay in this volume that is least historical and most philosophical in orientation is, appropriately, on Petrarch. Metaphysical themes are accessed through formal structures by the poets I hold dear, and in the section Ordering the Macrotext: Time and Narrative I try to illuminate some of the ways in which this was done. The early Italian tradition boasts every possible variation of the dialectic between lyric and narrative, language versified and not versified: from the uncollected early lyrics, to sonnet cycles and full-fledged sonnet narratives like Il fiore, to the use of octaves deployed as narrative by Boccaccio in Filostrato, to the great narrative verse of the Commedia and the modern lyric sequence of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Which is not to mention prose works that contain lyrical islands: Dante’s treatise Convivio takes the form of prose commentary to lyric canzoni; even the Decameron, one of the world’s greatest testaments to the power of prose, concludes each Day with a lyric ballata. Much of my work on this tradition has involved finding ways to understand the significance of these forms, the deep meaning of the lyric/narrative contaminatio.

My tools for getting a handle on this problematic have been Aristotle on time, Augustine on time and language, Boethius on eternity, Aquinas on angels and discursive thinking, Dante on the epistemological differences between humans and angels, and Paul Ricoeur’s use of Aristotle and Augustine in his formulation of a modern dechronologized narrative.¹⁴ Using these philosophers, I forged an approach that led me from Petrarch in 1989*s "The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" to reading the Paradiso as an example of what Ricoeur calls dechronologized narrative in The Undivine Comedy and thence back to the anti-narrative of the Vita nuova as a forerunner to the Paradiso in 1994’s "‘Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine’: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova." I continue to use this approach in a book I am currently writing on Petrarch as a metaphysical poet.¹⁵

In retrospect, it is clear that these are the tools that have helped me to conceptualize and engage with the metaphysical strand of Italian culture and thought.

The formal contaminatio of lyric and narrative textuality reflects, I believe, the deep dialectic between metaphysical and historical, between the astral and the artisanal, in Italian culture. Already in the Vita nuova the tension between the lyrics and the prose that surrounds them is the tension between the impulse to evade historicity and the impulse to channel and control it. All products of the human epistemological condition—of what Dante in Paradiso 29.81 calls concetto diviso—are themselves divisible, marked by their existence in time. No verbal artifact is immune from division/distinctio/difference: from time, sequence, and number. Much of the lyrical enterprise could be viewed as a search for indemnity from time; the lyric is a verbal artifact wherein meter, rhyme, and metaphoric density work to simulate the illusion of a protected and extratemporal dimension. When Dante decides, early on in the Vita nuova, to subject a sonnet to division, he is deciding on a convention—which he later calls divisione—whose avowed purpose is to lay bare the poem’s significance and whose more salient purpose is to divest the poem of any residual temporal immunity. He confronts head-on (this is another of Dante’s signature characteristics as a poet and intellectual) the tension between metaphysical and historical that is also at the core of the Commedia’s textuality.

It should be clear that my work is a testament to the idea that there is no such thing as mere form. Here, too, I can see traces of a response to my formation, since Italian critical language is full of disparagements of mere form, an intriguing attitude in the context of a culture that has frequently been viewed by other cultures as over-committed to beauty but lacking in substance and grit. Form in my use is Aristotelian. The form is the essence: it is not less deep than metaphysics; it is not abstractable as surface value. My critical blazon is perfectly expressed by Beatrice, who, speaking of paradise, says "è formale ad esto beato esse" (it is essential to this blessed state) (Par. 3.79), in a phrase where è formale means e essenziale: it is formal to this state signifies it is essential to this state. To make this point more exquisitely, moreover, Beatrice puns, moving from that which is essential or intrinsic to being in e formale to esse, the infinitive of to be, being itself.

To be the form of some thing is to be the thing itself. Thus, the order, as he called it, that Petrarch devised as the form of his lyrics (he used the notation transcripsi in ordine to mark and cancel a poem he had transcribed from a notebook into the order of the Fragmenta) is its essence—it is essential to its being, è formale al suo esse—not a merely superficial trapping of its content. It is the form that renders time in its metaphysical reality, and that comes closest to expressing the deep meaning of Petrarch’s opus. By the same token, Dante’s ideological positions are so powerful because they are expressed through what in The Undivine Comedy I call the ideology of the form, not merely as content. Boccaccio, too, whose Decameron might be considered the least formally wrought of these works, invests his ethically and socially (more than metaphysically) inclined meditation on human existence in a complex formal structure, "The Wheel of the Decameron." And it is Boccaccio who expressly conflates the human fight against entropy with the elaborate formal structure of his masterpiece by having Pampinea declare that the storytellers must organize themselves because le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare (things that are without a definite form cannot last for long) (Decameron, Intro.1.95).

Through the verb durare (to endure, to last), we can track an Italian poetics of entropy: from Dante’s robust embrace of a humanistic duration on the one hand, in di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura (whose fame still endures in the world) (Inf. 2.59) and col nome che più dura e più onora (with the name that most lasts and most honors) (Purg. 21.85), and on the other hand his Augustinian indictment of those mortal things whose fate is to venire a corruzione, e durar poco (come to corruption, and last but little) (Par. 7.126), to Petrarch’s aesthetic lament for human life as the venue in which cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura (the beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure) (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 248.8). Prior to these authors we find Cavalcanti’s psychological usage in the canzone Io non pensava che lo cor giammai, where he feels his soul tremble from love sì come quella che non pò durare (as one that cannot last) (21). Of all these expressions of entropy and our struggle against it, the one most invested in the social contract is Boccaccio’s le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare.

I strongly believe—and this is another pillar of my critical praxis—that there is very little that modern philosophers and theorists have come up with that great authors of the past did not comprehend and address in their work. With respect to time and narrative, for instance, Ricoeur begins his two tomes with a chapter on Aristotle and a chapter on Augustine, because these two philosophers formulated the key insights on which he builds. Dante read Aristotle—he cites Aristotle’s definition of time as numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi (number of movement, according to before and after) in Convivio 4.2.6—and he read Augustine’s Confessions, with its great meditation on time and language. The ideas of modern theory are important to keep us as critics alive in terms of the kinds of questions we bring to the texts we read, as a dialogue among ourselves in the here and now, but not as that which we must apply to texts of the past in order to formulate questions of which their authors were unaware. There is, in my opinion, a tendency to sequester the modern period and to assume for it a greater conceptual novelty than it merits. History being the unmarked continuum that it is, our attempts to discretize the continuum, as scientists put it in a metaphor that I borrow out of proper context, are bound to be subject to endless pushings of the (invented) boundaries forward and back and the privileging of our own time is to be expected. Let me say for the record, however, that in my experience the great texts of the early Italian tradition can be trusted to generate every kind of question pertinent to the human condition, and that we rarely surprise a Dante, a Petrarch, or a Boccaccio with a question that he did not ask himself.

In all these essays I have tried to achieve an enriched historical context: in the history of ideas, of literary forms, of human events. My path to an enriched historical context has been a textual one: I have striven to take the text seriously, even literally, and to disregard the commentary material that tells us, implicitly and at times explicitly, not to take what the text says at face value. This most primary of my critical tenets—to which I came intuitively, even before I knew I had critical tenets, and probably through my distaste for authority—has been a hallmark of all my writing. Going back to my first book, certainly the idea that we should take seriously the Commedia’s negative remarks about Vergil and the Aeneid, remarks that are airbrushed out of the commentary tradition with its unrelenting focus on the pilgrim’s filial piety, was key to Dante’s Poets. As a narratological study of the Commedia that deliberately privileges the how over the what that has dominated Dante criticism, The Undivine Comedy does nothing but take the text seriously: thus, the overlooked prosaic third verse of the Paradiso, in una parte più e meno altrove, became the cornerstone of my reading of the third canticle as the dialectical struggle between on the one hand the need for (Neoplatonic) oneness and similitude and on the other the equally pressing need for (Aristotelian) differentiation and individuality.

And now more than ever, as I work on a commentary to Dante’s lyrics, I find that taking what the poems say at face value reveals a Pandora’s box of material that has simply never been noticed. There is for instance a wealth of social concerns embedded in stil novo poems that have been read only in terms of their ideology of love. To give but one example from volume 1 of the commentary, the two sonnets in Vita nuova XXII/13, in which Dante imagines a dialogue between himself and the ladies who are mourning the death of Beatrice’s father, show us a Dante at odds with the restrictive social conventions of Florentine mourning practices: he desires a level of participation—including participation in the act of weeping—that is inappropriate for him both as a nonintimate and as a man. These sonnets, Voi che portate la sembianza umile and Se’ tu colui c’ hai trattato sovente, testify to a poet who views Florentine society with an almost anthropological interest and also to a poet whose desire to transgress encompasses not only the poetic boundaries to which we are accustomed but social and gender boundaries as well. These reflections, based on just two, not particularly acclaimed, sonnets, suggest the massive work of social and historical contextualization that lies before us.¹⁶

With respect to all the texts discussed in this volume but perhaps the Commedia in particular, an enriched historical context and a deeper understanding of its place within various histories—the history of visions, the history of the afterlife, the history of monasticism, the history of Aristotelianism, the history of Neoplatonism, the history of women, the history of gender, the history of Italy—is the great task that lies before us. One of the results of detheologizing—the work I attempt to do in The Undivine Comedy—is that the path is made clear for historicizing: once we make the effort to read the text not through the overdetermined theologized hermeneutic structures manufactured for us by Dante, we are in a position to see much more. Thus, if we take Francesca out of the hermeneutic structure provided by Dante’s hell, we can pose different sorts of questions to the extraordinarily rich text of Inferno 5, in effect seeing a text we have looked at many times before through different eyes, because we look at it through a different prism generated by history.

Similarly, thinking about the Commedia in the context of the history of visions gave me new insight into Dante and the classical tradition, into Dante’s humanism. Dante does not differ from his humble visionary colleagues in the inclusion of contemporaries in his afterlife, or in the inclusion of popes or kings who are subject to retroactive visionary sanction; these are actions for which there are precedents. There is, however, no precedent for Dante’s inclusion of figures from classical antiquity. The history of visions thus gave me a new prism through which to perceive Dante’s early brand of humanism, his passionate commitment to classical culture. When scholars of the Renaissance, in search of periodicity and the demarcation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, point to Dante’s placement of Aristotle and other pagans in limbo and therefore in hell as an emblem of his still being medieval in orientation, they miss the significance of his choosing limbo, a space that theologians reserved for the Hebrew righteous and then, after the harrowing of hell, only for unbaptized infants.

But Dante goes even further, inventing within the already anomalous choice of limbo a special dispensation, including light, for the great pagans of antiquity (and selected moderns, such as Saladin and Averroes), a special status that gives rise to the pilgrim’s query, questi chi son c’hanno cotanta onranza, / che dal modo de li altri li diparte (who are these who have so much honor that it sets them apart from the way of the others?) (Inf. 4.74–75). Dante’s theologically unjustifiable move to sequester the great pagans from the unmitigated reality of hell by placing them in a specially configured section of limbo—and indeed by placing them in limbo at all—is of great cultural significance: It speaks to his humanism.

We need to revise our notions of periodicity to understand better both the construction of the Italian imaginary and Dante’s role within that historical process. Dante belongs to a specifically Italian historiography which is breathtakingly compressed: the Summa of the Middle Ages and the Father of the Renaissance were literally walking our planet at the same time. Again, history is a powerful clarifier: if we put Dante’s limbo in historical context, considering the history of the set of concepts aggregated under the rubric limbo, we see how anomalous Dante’s limbo really is, despite a commentary tradition that makes little mention of this anomaly, for the history of limbo does not include pagans—and it also does not conjure a lovely greensward bathed in light for the great poets and thinkers of the past. Thus, the point is not so much that Dante put most (but not all) of his pagans in hell (he also was anomalous in saving pagans—in other words, in putting them in paradise), but rather that classical antiquity exerted such a pull on his imagination that he felt compelled to engage with it despite the absence of theological authority or visionary precedent.

A distinguishing feature of Italian literary culture, most likely a significant factor in its precocious intellectual maturity and sophistication—not cynicism, not heaviness, but a quality of intellectual joy, a quality of being born like Athena full-grown from the head of Zeus—is the early value put on classical antiquity by Dante. This value and its implicit humanism is stunningly captured by the image on this volume’s cover: the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo’s fifteenth-century illustration of Paradiso 33.¹⁷ Here we see the sustained magisterial presence of the female teacher, in itself a telling declaration of Beatrice’s importance for Dante’s poem, for the fact that she is no longer at the pilgrim’s side in canto 33 does not succeed in eliminating her from Giovanni’s—and our—experience of the canto. Most remarkably, Giovanni unpacks the image in which Dante compares his wonder to that of Neptune upon looking up and seeing the shadow of the first ship, Jason’s Argo. The result is that the icon of the Virgin Mary, emblem for the fervent prayer to the Virgin uttered by Bernard of Clairvaux with which Paradiso 33 begins (and for which Giovanni created a separate illustration), is on the same visual plane as the ship Argo and Neptune with his trident. Giovanni di Paolo places classical antiquity on an ancient green sea literally alongside a radiant Virgin, and in so doing he captures a great truth about Dante’s poem—and about Italian culture.

Dante is not only present at the origins of Italian literary culture but, in ways that are still relevant today, he is the origin of Italian literary culture.

I would like to record my gratitude to Juliet Nusbaum, who as my editorial assistant worked with consistent graciousness, efficiency, and intelligence throughout this project. Fortuna smiled upon me yet again when she brought this book to Fordham; in particular, I would like to thank Helen Tartar, who illuminated the way with her unfailing editorial expertise and wisdom, and Robert Oppedisano, who warmed it with his committed and generous vision of a university press.

PART I

A Philosophy of Desire

CHAPTER I

Dante and the Lyric Past

Dante is heir to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provencal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry—based on the notion of the lover’s feudal service to mi-dons (Italian, madonna), his lady, from whom he expects a guerdon (Italian, guiderdone), or reward—were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo. Palermo became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence’s contentious political poetry, which was left behind.

The leader (Italian, caposcuola) of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provençal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric genres). Giacomo signs himself the Notary, referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old—represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself—and the new: the avant-garde poets of the dolce stil novo or sweet new style (Purg. 24.57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth. Like Giacomo, the other Sicilian poets were in the main court functionaries: in the De vulgari eloquentia Guido delle Colonne is called Judge of Messina, while Pier della Vigna, whom Dante places among the suicides in hell, was Frederick’s chancellor and private secretary. Their moment in history coincides with Frederick’s moment, and the demise of their school essentially coincides with the emperor’s death in 1250.

At the heart of troubadour poetry is an unresolved tension between the poet-lover’s allegiance to the lady and his allegiance to God; the love-service owed the one inevitably comes into conflict with the love-service owed the other. Giacomo da Lentini renders the conflict with great clarity in this sonnet (Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire):

Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire,

com’io potesse gire in paradise,

al santo loco ch’aggio audito dire,

u’ si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso.

Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire,

quella c’ha blonda testa e claro viso,

ché sanza lei non poteria gaudere,

estando da la mia donna diviso.

Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento,

perch’io peccato ci volesse fare;

se non veder lo suo bel portamento

e lo bel viso e ’l morbido sguardare:

che lo mi teria in gran consolamento,

veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare.

I have proposed in my heart to serve God, that I might go to paradise, to the holy place of which I have heard said that there are maintained pleasure, play, and laughter. Without my lady I do not wish to go, the one who has a blond head and a clear face, since without her I could not take pleasure, being from my lady divided. But I do not say this with such an intention, that I would want to commit a sin; but rather because I would want to see her beautiful comportment and her beautiful face and her sweet glance: for it would keep me in great consolation, to see my lady be in glory.¹

Giacomo’s sonnet exemplifies the courtly dilemma of conflicted desire. In it, the poet deploys the considerable resources of the sonnet as a formal construct in such a way as to highlight and dramatize his theme, which is that he—like the sonnet itself—is diviso (8), divided in two.

The Sicilian sonnet is divided into two parts, set off from each other by a change in rhyme: the octave rhymes ABABAB, and the sextet rhymes CDCDCD. While there are possible variations in the rhyme scheme of the sextet (it could be CDECDE, for instance), there is always a switch at this point from the A and B rhymes to a new set of rhymes; there is always, in other words, a cleavage, created by rhyme, between the first eight verses and the latter six. It is this cleavage that Io m’aggio posto exploits in such paradigmatic fashion.

Giacomo has perfectly fused form and content: the divisions inherent in the sonnet form express the divisions experienced by the poet-lover, who is himself diviso in the octave’s last word. Moreover, subdivisions within the octave, divisible into two quatrains, and the sextet, divisible into two tercets (or, in this case, just as plausibly into three couplets), are also fully exploited in order to render the two poles of the poet-lover’s divided allegiance. As compared to the canzone, the lyric genre that allows for narrative development and forward movement, the sonnet’s compact fourteen-verse form epitomizes a moment, a thought, or a problematic by approaching it from two dialectical perspectives: in a classic Italian sonnet, an issue is posed in the octave, and in some way reconsidered or resolved in the sextet.

Looking at Giacomo’s poem, we see that the first quatrain identifies one pole of the poet’s desire: he wants to serve God, to go to paradise. His yearning does not at this stage seem conflicted, and the entire first quatrain could be placed under the rubric Dio: "Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire. With hindsight we can see that the potential for conflict is already present in the fourth verse’s very secular—and very courtly—definition of paradise as a place that offers sollazzo, gioco e riso: a trio lexically and morally associated not with the pleasures of paradise, but with the pleasures of the court. But the fact that there is an alternative pole of desire, an alternative claim on the lover’s fealty, is not made evident until we reach the second quatrain, which belongs to the donna as much as the first quatrain belongs to Dio: Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire. Without her he does not want to go to paradise; the octave has neatly posed the problem with which the sextet must now deal. And in fact there is a sharp turn toward orthodoxy in the sextet’s first couplet, in the initial adversative Ma, and in the recognition that the lover’s stance harbors a potential for sin, peccato; but a second adversative, se non, follows on the heels of the first, negating its negation and reestablishing the poet’s will to let the lady dominate. What follows is the listing of those literally dominant" attributes (as in attributes pertaining to the domina) whose absence would render paradise intolerable, a concatenation of three adjective-plus-noun copulae that gains in momentum and power by being somewhat (in contrast to the otherwise relentlessly clipped syntactical standards of this poem) run on from verse 11 to verse 12: lo suo bel portamento / e lo bel viso e ‘l morbido sguardare. The lady is in the ascendant, and the poem concludes with a poetic resolution that makes the point that there is no ideological resolution to be had. Although the last verse brings together the two terms of the conflict (the lady and glory, or the lady and paradise), they are yoked in a kind of secularized beatific vision that affirms the poet-lover’s commitment not to Dio, but to the donna: paradise is only desirable if it affords the opportunity to see la mia donna in ghiora stare.

From Sicily the lyric moved north to the communes of Tuscany, where it was cultivated by poets like Bonagiunta da Lucca, Dante’s purgatorial poetic taxonomist, and Guittone d’Arezzo (d. 1294), the caposcuola of the Tuscan School. Although consistently reviled by Dante for his municipal language and excessively ornate and cumbersomely convoluted verse, Guittone set the standard for Tuscan poets to follow, or—in the case of Dante and his fellow practitioners of the sweet new style—to refuse to follow. From a lexical and stylistic perspective, in fact, the new style is best characterized precisely in terms of its rejection of the rhetorical and stylistic norms popularized by Guittone, through a process of winnowing that generated a refined but limited lexical and stylistic range. A genuinely important poet who rewards study on his own terms (this somewhat defensive affirmation of Guittone’s worth is the result of centuries of Dante-inspired devalorization