Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Teodolinda Barolini

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823227051
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire médiévale et du début des temps modernes

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.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
MUSINGS AGAINST THE GRAIN: MUSINGS OF AN ITALIANIST,
FROM THE ASTRAL TO THE ARTISANAL

1. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); trans. into Italian by Paolo Barlera, Il miglior fabbro: Dante e i poeti della Commedia (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), trans. into Italian by Roberta Antognini, La Commedia senza Dio: Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003).

2. The Commedia is cited throughout this volume in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, “La Commedia” secondo l’antica vulgata, 4 vols. (Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

3. Dante accomplishes the insertion of the name “Malebolge” in a fashion that is if anything even more narratologically manipulative, since he implies the speech acts of the denizens of hell. “Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge” (There is a place in hell called Malebolge [Inf. 18.1]) leaves unanswered (and usually unasked) the question “by whom, and in what conversations, is this place ‘detto Malebolge?’”

4. Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari, eds., Le Rime (1899; rpt. Firenze: Sansoni, 1957), xxiii.

5. Il Gattopardo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1980) 29; translation mine.

6. See the online preface to the Italian translation of The Undivine Comedy at the Feltrinelli Web site, www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaTesti?id_testo=1198&id_speclibro=1013.

7. Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio (Milano: Garzanti, 1988) chapter 1, “Leggerezza”: “Se volessi scegliere un simbolo augurale per l’affacciarsi al nuovo millennio, sceglierei questo: l’agile salto improwiso del poeta-filosofo che si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo” (If I wanted to choose an inaugural symbol for the arrival of the next millennium, I would choose this: the agile sudden leap of the poet-philosopher who lifts himself above the heaviness of the world [13; trans. mine]). Calvino is somewhat reluctant—the fault I believe of the reception history I have been discussing—to allow Dante his share of leggerezza, acknowledging a bit defensively that “quando Dante vuole esprimere leggerezza, anche nella Divina Commedia, nessuno sa farlo meglio di lui” (when Dante wants to express lightness, even in the Divine Comedy, no one can do it better than he [16]).

8. Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. 6 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951): “Quest’interna dilaniante contraddizione costituisce l’essenza dell’inferno e provoca nel dannato il frenetico moto della disperazione, che Dante ha potentemente sceneggiato nelle terzine, ove descrive il rumoreggiare incomposto della ‘perduta gente’ (Inf. 3.22–30)” (This lacerating internal contradiction constitutes the essence of hell and provokes in the damned soul a frenetic movement of desperation, which Dante has powerfully dramatized in the tercets where he describes the meaningless clamor of the ‘lost people’” [1946; trans. mine]).

9. The Papal Encyclicals, 1903–1939, trans. Claudia Carlen Ihm (Raleigh: Edwards, 1981), 214, 216.

10. My interest in Dante’s lyrics goes back to Dante’s Poets (see chapter 1). Three of the cappelli introduttivi for my commentary appear in the new journal Dante: Rivista internazionale di studi danteschi 1 (2004): 21-38, as “Saggio di un nuovo commento alle Rime di Dante. 1. La dispietata mente che pur mira: l’io al crocevia di memoria e disio; 2. Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare: l’io diviso tra mondo maschile e mondo femminile; 3. Guido, i’vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io: l’io e l’incanto della non-differenza.”

11. Sylvia Tomasch, “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 247–67.

12. Another interesting use of my work in this context is Kathleen Biddick’s “Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express,” American Historical Review 105.4 (2000): 1234–49.

13. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For a strong position against dualism within Dante studies, see Christian Moeus, The Metaphysics of Dante’s “Comedy” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

14. For a discussion of these philosophers in the context of time and narrative, see chapter 8 of The Undivine Comedy.

15. Two forthcoming essays are part of this ongoing book project, Petrarch, Metaphysical Poet. One is an overview, “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: The Self in the Labyrinth of Time” in The Panoptical Petrarch, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); the other is a “metaphysical” reading of the first twenty-one poems of the collection, “Metaphysical Markers at the Beginning of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in Petrarch and Dante, ed. Zygmunt Barański and Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).

16. The work on Dante’s tenzone with Forese Donati by Susan Noakes is an important example of scholarship moving in this direction; see her “Virility, Nobility, and Banking: The Crossing of Discourses in the Tenzone with Forese,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 241–258.

17. Giovanni di Paolo’s 61 illustrations to the Paradiso are in the British Library’s Yates Thompson codex, created around 1445 for the library of the king of Naples; the illustration to Paradiso 33 is British Library Yates Thompson 36, folio 190. Giovanni di Paolo’s extraordinary illustrations may be easily viewed in John Pope-Hennessy, Paradiso: The Illuminations to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” by Giovanni di Paolo (New York: Random House, 1993).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
DANTE AND THE LYRIC PAST

This essay originally appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14–33.

1. Throughout this volume thirteenth-century Italian lyric poets are cited from the edition of Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1960) with three exceptions. Guittone d’Arezzo is cited from both Poeti del Duecento (Ora parrà; Gente noiosa; Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi) and from Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, ed. Francesco Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940). For Guido Cavalcanti, I have used the edition of Domenico De Robertis, Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti (Torino: Einaudi, 1986). For editions of Dante’s lyrics, see note 5, below. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

2. Christopher Kleinhenz provides a thorough review of the cultivators of the early sonnet in The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986).

3. The Vita nuova is cited from the edition of Domenico De Robertis (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980) throughout this volume. I use the traditional Vita nuova, in Italian, because I have not been convinced by the arguments put forward by Guglielmo Gorni for changing to Vita Nova, in Latin; see Vita Nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Torino: Einaudi, 1996). In his edition Guglielmo Gorni also makes new chapter divisions; in current work, such as my Rizzoli commentary to Dante’s lyrics, I use both the traditional (Barbian) chapter divisions and Gorni’s chapter divisions in referring to the Vita nuova. I have not added the Gorni chapter divisions to these essays, written before Gorni’s edition came out.

4. For the “authorized view of Dante’s lyric past” as recounted in the Vita nuova and the Commedia, and in general for the Commedia’s handling of the vernacular tradition, see Dante’s Poets, chapters 1 and 2, of which I give a condensed version here.

5. The twentieth century produced three great editions of Dante’s lyrics, each magisterial in its own way. The fruits of Michele Barbi’s long philological and historical labors are to be found in two volumes published after his death: Michele Barbi and Francesco Maggini, eds., Rime della “Vita Nuova” e della giovinezza (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1956); Michele Barbi and Vincenzo Pernicone, eds., Rime della maturità e dell’esilio (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1969). Gianfranco Contini’s Rime (1946; 2d ed., Torino: Einaudi, 1965) remains unsurpassed for the pithiness and elegance of its formulations. (The same can be said for Contini’s introductions to the various poets represented in his anthology, Poeti del Duecento, cited above.) Most useful for its comprehensiveness and for the clarity of the portrait that emerges of the early Italian lyric schools is the edition of Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). This editorial enterprise culminated with the publication in 2002 of Domenico De Robertis’s monumental five-volume edition of Dante lyrics. For a full description and critique of De Robertis’s edition, as well as a comparative analysis of all these editions, their choices, and the hermeneutical and cultural implications thereof, see the essay “Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History” in this volume.

Citations of the Rime are from Barbi-Maggini and Barbi-Pernicone throughout this volume, except for “Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History,” “Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo,” and “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature,” which follow De Robertis. References to Contini, Rime, and to Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, are to the editions cited above.

6. The transition from contraction to expansion is well documented by Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

7. On the rime petrose, in themselves and in relation to the Commedia, see Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s “Rime Petrose” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

8. Fabian Alfie puts to rest the question of the attribution in “For Want of a Nail: The Guerri-Lanza-Cursietti Argument regarding the Tenzone,” Dante Studies 116 (1998): 141–59. For an important new reading of the tenzone, see Susan Noakes, “Virility, Nobility, and Banking: The Crossing of Discourses in the Tenzone with Forese,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 241–58.

9. The translation is from Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 1:153.

10. See ibid., 2:305.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
GUITTONE’S ORA PARRÀ, DANTE’S DOGLIA MI RECA, AND THE
COMMEDIA’S ANATOMY OF DESIRE

This essay originally appeared in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: International Dante Seminar 1, ed. Zygmunt Barański (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1997), 3–23.

1. The references to Guittone’s poems in this essay follow the numbering of the edition of Francesco Egidi, Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo (Bari: Laterza, 1940), although Ora parrà is cited from Contini, Poeti del Duecento.

2. Note Guittone’s fondness...