Authorizing Petrarch 9781501736902

Citation preview

Authorizing Petrarch

BY THE SAME AUTHOR!

Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral

Authorizing Petrarch William J. Kennedy

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED WITH THE AID OF A GRANT FROM THE HULL MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

Copyright © 1994 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Quotations from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), copyright © 1976 by Robert M. Durling, are reprinted by permission of the publisher. First published 1994 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America @ The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, William J. (William John), 1942Authorizing Petrarch / William J. Kennedy. p.

cm.

English and Italian. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-2974-9 1. Petrarchism.

2. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374—Criticism and

interpretation—History.

3. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374. Rime. I. Title.

PQ4535-K46 851'.!—dc2o

1994 94-21659

For Mary

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/authorizingpetraOOkenn

Contents

Preface

ix

References

xiii

1

Petrarchan Authorities and the Authorization of Petrarch

2

Authorizing Commentaries

1

25

Authorizing Literacy and a Readership

25

Authorizing Monarchism: Antonio da Tempo, Francesco Filelfo, and Hieronimo Squarzafico

36

Authorizing Narrative: Alessandro Vellutello

45

Authorizing Rhetoric: Sylvano da Venafro, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, and Bernardino Daniello

52

Authorizing Reform: Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli, and Ludovico Castelvetro

3

67

Authorizing Petrarch in Italy

82

Authorizing Petrarch’s Language: Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua

82

The Stiffening of Medusa: Petrification and Petrarchification in Pietro Bembo’s Rime 4

102

Authorizing Gender Revisions

114

Vittoria Colonna and the Rules of Gender

114

Veronica Gambara and the Gender of Rule

134

Pernette du Guillet and the Ladies of Lyon

146

vii

CONTENTS

Vili

5

Petrarchan Transfers in Louise Labé’s Evvres

160

Petrarchan Affiliations in Louise Labé’s Evvres

178

Authorizing Petrarch in England: Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti

195

Secular and Sacral Homologies: Edmund Spenser’s Three Elizabeths

195

At the Court of the Faerie Queene: Instrumentalities of Petrarchism

216

Where Grace Abounds: Correcting Petrarch

235

Twaine Shal Be One: Marriage and Provisional Fulfillment Redeeming Petrarchism

254 266

Conclusion

281

Appendix

285

Primary Texts Cited

289

Index

295

Preface

T

he anonymous author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) registers his belief that the word author derives from the Greek autos archos

‘self ruler’ when he describes God “in euery respect selfe siffizant [autharcos\ reposed in all perfect rest and soueraigne blisse, not needing or exacting any forreine helpe or good.”1 A human author is a writer whose verbal claims are so complete, so self-possessed, so self-definitive that they command their own authority. The work of such a writer enters readily into a canon of authoritative texts, supplying—as the Greek canon sug¬ gests—a ‘norm’ or ‘rule’ by which to measure other texts. In a century so skeptical as ours, however, the authority of no text appears self-evi¬ dent, nor does its admission to a canon seem the guaranteed outcome of any natural consensus. Authors become authorized through complex processes of cultural interaction and, at times, of social and political intervention. In Michel Foucault’s terms, several functional conditions of discursive practice modify these processes. They concern the text’s institutional attribution, circulation, valorization, and appropriation.2 This book examines the authorizing of Petrarch’s Rime sparse as a ca¬ nonical lyric text for a broad fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European readership and for an equally broad assemblage of lyric poets in Italy,

‘George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Wil¬ son (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 28. 2Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 135.

X

PREFACE

France, and England. Materials to study this authorization appear ready to hand in volumes of imitative poetry inspired by an international Petrarchism, but they also appear in a series of critical and exegetical glosses and commentaries appended to early printed editions of the Rime sparse. The history of these glosses and commentaries records a narrative of multiple Petrarchs who, in different ways according to different com¬ mentators, addressed provocative issues about politics, religion, love, gender relationships, class distinctions, and loyalty to associates. Com¬ peting versions of Petrarch’s responses to these issues dominate the his¬ torical landscape so flamboyantly that one can only attribute to an active readership—and to successive poets who imitated the Rime sparse—the authority to select or invent which Petrarch serves their needs as model poet. The first three chapters of this book directly examine Petrarch’s poetry and the cadre of major fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian commen¬ taries on it. Chapter 1 explores the complex texture of the Rime sparse, whose poetry generated divergent interpretations and countless imita¬ tions. Chapter 2 focuses on ten major commentaries whose publication between 1476 and 1582 shaped the reception of the Rime sparse in Italy and elsewhere. They range from the earliest efforts of Antonio da Tempo (1420s? published 1477), Francesco Filelfo (1440s, published 1476), and Hieronimo Squarzafico (published 1484), which represent Petrarch from a northern Italian perspective as a proponent of Ghibelline mon¬ archism, to the radically revisionary biography of Alessandro Vellutello (published 1525), which prompts a rearrangement of the poems in Pe¬ trarch’s famous sequence. They include detailed rhetorical analyses by Sylvano da Venafro (1533), Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (1533), and Ber¬ nardino Daniello (1541) and theologically heterodox representations of Petrarch as a proto-Protestant and forerunner of reform by Fausto da Longiano (1532), Antonio Brucioli (1548), and Ludovico Castelvetro (published 1582). Credit for canonizing Petrarch’s stylistic elegance as the foremost model of vernacular poetry usually goes to Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525). Chapter 3 examines that work and its implications for a humanist theory of the vernacular, and offers a read¬ ing of Bembo’s creative poetry written in counterpoint to it. Petrarch s two-hundred-year-old Siculo-Tuscan literary idiom might speak oddly to the formative vernaculars of Italy, France, and England, but even more oddly would other features of Petrarch’s poetry address later generations. Subsequent poets could only question assumptions about monarchism, domestic relations, gender roles, marriage, and re¬ ligion imputed to Petrarch, asserted in the commentaries, and contested theie and elsewhere. What happens, for example, when these assump-

PREFACE

XI

tions are transported away from the fourteenth-century ecclesiastical cir¬ cles of Petrarch’s Avignon or the Ghibelline environment of Visconti Milan and relocated in the mid-sixteenth century at the Spanish-occu¬ pied vice-royalty of Naples or the regional ducal court of Correggio or yet more radically in the bourgeois commercial environment of urban Lyon? And what happens when imitative poets recast the speaker’s voice as belonging not to a man but to a woman, and indeed to various women conscious of gendered differences that circumscribe their social, politi¬ cal, economic, and cultural roles? In considering these questions, Chap¬ ter 4 traces Petrarch’s authorization as a model for the poetry of Vittoria Colonna (1548) and Veronica Gambara (1546) among the elite in cen¬ tral Italy and of Pernette du Guillet (1544) and Louise Labé (1555) m bourgeois Lyon. Chapter 5 focuses upon Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti (1595) as symptomatic of various strains defining Petrarchism at the later Elizabethan court in England. Spenser’s position as a marginalized member of that court enables him to criticize its values when they im¬ pinge on his own visionary and progressive impulses. Spenser, a Protes¬ tant critical of extreme Protestant moralism, perceives bifurcations in the courtly milieu that parallel those in Petrarchism itself. His Amoretti is unique in the canon of Petrarchan amatory poetry because it tries to resolve its social and sexual tensions in an approved Christian marriage, a resolution conservative in its outcome but revolutionary in its address to a readership familiar with the cautionary moralism of the Elizabethan sonnet craze on the one hand and, on the other, the feudal revivalism implicit in this craze. This book bears the imprint of Cornell large and small. In tracing Petrarch’s early modern critical reception, it owes its greatest debt to the magnificent Willard Fiske Dante and Petrarch Collection in the Carl A. Kroch Rare Book Room of Olin Library. I gratefully acknowledge the unfailing help of its staff, especially James Tyler and Lucy Burgess, over many years, but above all in the penultimate stages of this book’s prep¬ aration when—chaos compounded—the collection was being moved to splendid new subterranean quarters. I gratefully acknowledge, too, the contribution of four talented graduate assistants: Myra Best, Jeanne-Hélène Roy, and Alan K. Smith, who cross-checked every quotation from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries and who conferred polish and accuracy upon my original translations; and Irene EibensteinAlvisi, who helped make my bibliography manageable. At one time or another I have prevailed upon nearly every member of the departments of Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies and of the Renaissance

Xll

PREFACE

Colloquium at Cornell to give me guidance and advice, and I can report only some of my debt in the footnotes. For reading and listening to my work at early stages I cheerfully thank Marilyn Migiel, Kathleen Perry Long, and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, and I particularly thank Carol Kaske for commenting extensively on a tortuous early draft of Chapter 5. Grad¬ uate and undergraduate participants in my courses have afforded me fruitful insights. At Cornell University Press I am grateful for the mag¬ nanimous support of its literature editor, Bernhard Kendler, its manag¬ ing editor, Kay Scheuer, and my copyeditor, Lisa Turner. At an early stage I profited from the interest and encouragement of many friends and colleagues outside Cornell, especially Thomas M. Greene, James Mirollo, and Francois Rigolot. At a later stage I received much-needed information and response from Theodore Cachey, Donald Cheney, Heather Dubrow, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Paul McDonald, Ignacio Navarette, the late Raymond Prier, Germaine Warkentin, and Nancy Vickers. As readers for the Press, Roland Greene and Anne Lake Prescott offered detailed suggestions for improvement that helped rid my copy of error and misjudgment. The generous gift of a John Simon Guggen¬ heim Memorial Foundation Fellowship made writing and revision pos¬ sible at a particularly critical period. Only my immediate family can know what that means. William

Ithaca, New York

J.

Kennedy

References

Q

uotations from primary sources refer to editions listed in the Works Cited. All references to scholarly and critical studies appear in the footnotes. I use Gianfranco Contini’s third edition of Petrarch’s Canzon¬ iere as my copy-text, and have profited greatly from the annotations of Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari. I quote Robert Durling’s superb translation of the Rime sparse, though in a few cases I have modified it (indicated by “trans, mod.’’) to concur with my critical understanding. I cite existing translations of other texts whenever possible, and I list them accordingly in the notes or Works Cited. All quotations from Scrip¬ ture are taken from the Geneva Bible of 1560; it was a text available to Spenser and was nearly contemporary with the major Italian and French texts discussed in this book. AJ1 other translations are mine.

Xlll

Authorizing Petrarch

CHAPTER

ONE

Petrarchan Authorities and the Authorization of Petrarch

S

ince his own lifetime, several versions of Petrarch have competed with one another for authority and authorization. There is, of course, the fourteenth-century author Petrarch who wrote Italian lyrics that he referred to as “rerum vulgarium fragmenta” ‘fragments of vernacular writing’ and that we call his Rime sparse ‘Scattered Rhymes,’ in acknowl¬ edgment of sonnet 1, “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono’’ ‘You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound.’ Then there are fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on this poetry, critical beacons for a lyric Petrarchism that transgresses Petrarch’s model even while imitating it. They named the poems Le volgari opere or Le Rime or Sonetti, Canzoni, et Triomphi or, identifying them with the author, simply R Petrarca. There are, moreover, nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of Petrarch that challenge, or comply with, scholarly or academic constructions of “Me¬ dieval’’ or “Renaissance’’ authorship. They commonly bestow upon Pe¬ trarch’s poetry a title that implies some idea of its organic unity, R Canzoniere. Exemplifying generally Romantic convictions about the artist as a complex individual bequeathing a powerful style to an emulous posterity, they authorize a Petrarch who shapes an entire social discourse for his successors. Certainly for national literary histories produced in the modern acad¬ emy, Petrarch lures poets throughout sixteenth-century Europe—Pietro Bembo and members of his circle such as Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara in Italy, Juan Boscàn and Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain, the Lyonnais and Plèiade poets of France, and a host of Elizabethan sonl

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

2

neteers in England. Early printed editions of the Rime sparse, however, authorize a quite different view from the one promoted in such histories. The canonization of Petrarch s poetry unfolds as a fascinating narrative inscribed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries appended to the text. There are ten such major commentaries, and each promotes a different paradigm in a different discursive practice that reveals a differ¬ ent Petrarch. The result is that these printed editions authorize a suc¬ cession of ideologically different Petrarchs as remote from the cultural formation of their fourteenth-century author as are those fashioned by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars.

Consider the earliest commentary. It was composed by Antonio da Tempo in Padua during the 1420s, was reworked by Francesco Filelfo, who dedicated it to Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan in 1446, and was completed by Hieronimo Squarzafico in 1484, all three printed together as Petrarcha con Doi Commenti (considering Filelfo-Squarzafico as one) in at least nine separate editions between 1503 and 1523.1 Taking their cue from the biographical fact that Petrarch’s longest period of service in Italy was with the Visconti from 1353 to 1361, they authorize a Milanese view of Petrarch as a loyal public servant of the Visconti aristocracy. This Petrarch unapologetically promotes the strong monarchist ideals of Milan counter to the republican ones of Florence propounded in 1436 by Leonardo Bruni’s vita di Petrarca. Thanks to no little effort by the Medicis and their early sixteenth-century propagandist, Pietro Bembo, the Florentine view of Petrarch came to prevail against the Milanese one, but it prevailed only by entering into contestation with still other het¬ erogeneous views. By 1525 the Venetian editor Alessandro Vellutello sought to construct a more accurate history, neither Florentine nor Milanese, and so he rearranged what he called Le volgari opere del Petrarcha in order to recount events in the poet’s life as he thought they might coincide with the biography implied in Petrarch’s letters and other evidence. Vellutello and his follower, Sylvano da Venafro, who published his own annotated Il Petrarca at Naples in 1533, thus depict yet another Petrarch who differs from any predecessor. It is a Petrarch in the manner of a contempora¬ neous sixteenth-century Castiglione-style courtier, as mindful of the man¬ ners of the elite as of the control mechanisms that regulate social behavior. In 1533 and 1541 Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo and Bernardino

'See Mary Fowler, Cornell University Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), pp. 71-110; and Mary Fowler and Morris Bishop, Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection in the Cornell University Library (Millwood, N.J.: Kraus-Thomson, 1974), pp. 94-125.

PETRARCHAN AUTHORITIES

3

Daniello of Lucca turned their attention to the rhetorical surface of Petrarch’s poetry to generate authoritative analyses of its syntactic com¬ plexity, semantic depth, figurai spread, and tropological expansiveness, all as though Petrarch belonged to an ancient coterie of Roman—Au¬ gustan and imperial—authors whom they revered. Gesualdo’s title, It Petrarc.ha, celebrates the writer, while Daniello’s title, Sonetti, Canzoni, e Triomphi, accentuates the variety of his text. A final group of commentators authorizes a more radical, less pre¬ dictable view than the others, of a Petrarch imbued with Protestant Re¬ formist ideals. Fausto da Longiano in 1532, Ludovico Castelvetro in the 1540s, both at Modena, and Antonio Brucioli at Ferrara in 1548, rep¬ resent Petrarch as proto-Protestant, disdainful of scholastic clichés, teem¬ ing with references to Saint Augustine and the Scriptures, and adept in satirizing the Avignon papacy. Castelvetro’s alleged involvement with the Lutheran movement before he compiled his edition of Le Rime del Pe¬ trarca is well known. Fausto, tutor to the son of the count of Modena, wrote his commentary on II Petrarcha before leaving Modena under a cloud of heresy in 1542. Antonio Brucioli, who himself translated Scrip¬ ture and produced nine volumes of commentary on it by 1546, dedi¬ cated his annotations on the Sonetti, Canzoni, et Triomphi (1548) to Lucrezia d’Este, whose mother, Renée of France, harbored Clément Marot and Jean Calvin at her court in 1536. Reprinted by Guglielmo Rov¬ inio at Lyon in 1550, Brucioli’s commentary accompanied the first edition of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry published outside of Italy. To authorize Petrarch in these different ways presents a series of Petrarchs as different from one another as each is from the historical fourteenth-century author, and also as different as each is from twenti¬ eth-century constructions of Petrarch. Modern scholarship is alert to the problems, and it has produced splendid studies of anachronistic imita¬ tion, hermeneutic misprision, and temporal desire inscribed in the Rime sparsef Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century views of Petrarch emphasize other concerns that may appear startlingly arbitrary or remote: the poet’s acceptance or rejection of Church teachings, his understanding of Scrip¬ ture, his attitude toward Church practices, his criticism of its abuses, and his foreshadowing of Reformist principles; his philosophy of art, includ¬ ing rhetoric—whether it be classical, unclassical, or even anticlassical; his treatment of conduct and action—to what extent his ethics is natural

'Thus, for example, benchmark studies of anachronistic imitation by Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); moral misprision by Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989); and Petrarchan desire by Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

4

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

or normative according to roles defined by gender, class, and local iden¬ tity; and finally his politics—whether Guelph or Ghibelline, republican or monarchist, conventionally universalist or emergently national. In what Freudians would call an uncanny way, many of these concerns also happen to occupy the field of literary criticism as it enters the twentyfirst century. Not only are they profoundly relevant to early modern crit¬ ical understandings of Petrarch, but they are profoundly relevant to our late modern aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and sociocultural understandings as well. I propose to study these commentaries here in the light of subsequent poetic practice in Italy, France, and England. The ten commentaries that I have identified as major represent only a fraction of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century notes and glosses on Petrarch’s Rime sparse. For reasons that I explore in Chapter 2, they are more systematic, detailed, and ideo¬ logically expressive than other random or incomplete interpretive aids that followed their lead. They are not, however, inflexibly systematic or, even in partisan clusters, monolithic. The Northern pro-Visconti com¬ mentaries of Antonio da Tempo, Filelfo, and Squarzafico differ among themselves in interpreting sources and assessing style, as do those of the Reform-minded Fausto, Brucioli, and Castelvetro. So do the more or less rhetorical commentaries of Vellutello and Daniello in Venice or Sylvano and Gesualdo in Naples. Although they are often exquisitely sensitive to the text’s shifting nuances, none of them simply propounds a dominant ideology that reflects the power structures of its time. As products of a rhetorical culture, they challenge and contest one another s privileged positions and subject them to controversy and dispute. Only in a highly qualified critical sense do these commentaries inflect the Petrarchan poetry that follows in their wake. The perspectives that they open upon Petrarch’s texts are as often as not controverted by the imitative poets who encountered them. As I will show in Chapter 3, Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525) crystallizes a good deal of controversy and dispute and in the process canonizes Petrarch for Italy and all Eu¬ rope. Bembo’s own poetry, addressed to Lucrezia Borgia early in his life and to a string of mistresses later on, typifies promiscuous male Petrarchism. Not all Petrarchists were male, however. Women poets radically re¬ vised the gender roles so confidently assigned to Petrarch’s male lover and female beloved by the early commentators. Nor did all Petrarchists share the same social class. Aristocratic poets disdained the republican sentiment ascribed to Petrarch by some commentators, while, mutatis mutandis, bourgeois poets contemned the high courtly outlook ascribed by others. Surely Italian poets questioned the specific regional identities attributed to Petrarch, while French and English poets questioned the

PETRARCHAN AUTHORITIES

5

moral character attributed to him. Chapter 4 will examine poetry written by women of class and rank notably different from one another: Vittoria Colonna, an Italian noblewoman who retired from public life after her husband’s death; Veronica Gambara, who came from higher Italian no¬ bility and after her husband’s death acted strongly as regent for her sons; Pernette du Guillet, whose upper-middle-class origins brought her into contact with an avant garde circle of male poets and humanists in Lyon; and Louise Labé, whose bourgeois status in the same city marked her as different from du Guillet as both were from Colonna and Gambara. Yet all these women reworked the Petrarchan model, and their poetry res¬ onates against commentaries on the Rime sparse that deal with issues of gender, class, and social distinction. So too does Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, the topic of Chapter 5. This sequence disequilibrates Petrarchan views on relationships between men and women, on associations formed among members of different social classes, and on intimations of the divine in human affairs. Amid cultur¬ ally defined contradictions that retard his progress, the speaker can only question the assumptions upon which his progress depends. Despite the author’s evident firsthand acquaintance with the Rime sparse and the rel¬ evance of the Petrarchan commentaries for his work, the Amoretti differs from other male-authored Elizabethan sonnet sequences with its empha¬ sis on affective transformation and married love, an emphasis that sug¬ gests provisional resolution without ever quite achieving it. When you’ve read one Petrarchan sonnet sequence, you haven’t read them all. Sixteenth-century readers approached these issues through a thicket of verbal complexities, and it is there that we must begin. Petrarch’s sonnet 140 provides a condensed example of the linguistic virtuosity at stake in the Rime sparse: Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna e ’1 suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tene, talor armato ne la fronte véne, ivi si loca, et ivi pon sua insegna. Quella ch’amare et sofferir ne ’nsegna e vói che ’1 gran desio, l’accesa spene, ragion, vergogna, et reverenza affrene, di nostro ardir fra se stessa si sdegna. Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core, lasciando ogni sua impresa, et piange, et trema; ivi s’asconde, et non appar più fore. Che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore, se non star seco infin a l’ora estrema? ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more.

6

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Love who lives and reigns in my thought and keeps his principal seat in my heart, sometimes comes forth in all armor into my forehead, there camps, and there sets up his banner. She who teaches us to love and to be patient and wishes my great desire, my kindled hope, reason, shame, and reverence to rein in [trans, mod.], at our boldness is angry within herself. Wherefore Love flees terrified to my heart, abandoning his every enter¬ prise, and weeps and trembles; there he hides and no more appears outside. What can I do, when my lord is afraid, except stay with him until the last hour? For he makes a beautiful end [trans, mod.] who dies loving well.

The poem refers to the speaker’s encounter with his beloved, but only vaguely does it report their contact. It instead filters the action through a personification of Amor, figured not as a mischievous Ovidian Cupid, but as a mature military commander who flits incorporeally between the speaker’s forehead and his heart.3 The poem’s abstract quality invites speculation about Amor’s dramatic cowardice and the speaker’s obliviousness to it. Echoes of the word “Amor” in lines 1 and 9 and asso¬ nances of “amando more” in line 14 invite further speculation. The text’s semantic and syntactic complexity, the concrete materiality of its ever fragmenting and recombining verbal patterns, the transformation of its language across diverse registers of thought, emotion, and associ¬ ation emit iridescent changes of meaning at each turn. The poem’s linguistic markers, for example, impart a strangeness to the text that foregrounds its deliberate artifice. The undiphthongized forms of penser (for pensiero), cor (for cuore), véne (for viene), vói (for vuole), fore (for fuore), and more (for muore), together with the apocope (or droppage of the final syllable) in Amor, penser, cor, pon, sofferir, vói, ragion, ardir, appar, far, and star, recall Provencal and Sicilian influences upon its diction.4 These archaizing effects seem all the more egregious because of their irregularity. The apocopic cor in line 2, for example, precedes a non-apocopic core in line 9. The transposed word order of

3Roche cites this poem as his proof-text for exegetical complexity with the following summary: “Love, the poet-lover’s Lord, turning coward at the rebuff of the beloved, flees from the head to the heart (from the seat of reason to the seat of emotion). What is a poor lover to do when his Lord retreats? ... He must be loyal to his Lord, who has proved himself a coward, although the poet-lover does not realize this fact, nor that his Lord is leading him to defeat and death. . . . The poet-lover’s strategy is to blame his loid for his predicament of not succeeding with the lady and then to claim heroic loyalty for himself on the basis of his standing by his lord until the death. . . . [By this strategy] he absolves himself of any responsibility for his own predicament’’ (Petrarch and the English Sonnet Se¬ quences, pp. 84-85). 4See Giuseppe Guido Ferrerò, Petrarca e i trovatori (Turin: Gheroni, 1959)’ P- 5^ an PP- 58-5917Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 28-32. 18Arnaldo Petrucci, “Le biblioteche antiche,” in Letteratura italiana, voi. II: Produzione e consumo, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 542-43; for cautions against an easy correspondence between the public and a particular readership, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 61-66, 230-32. 19Parker, Commentary and Ideology, pp. 124-58. 20Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 397-99. For the veillée see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 201-2. 21For bourgeois readers see Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modem France 1500—1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976), pp. 175-78; and Robert Mouchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France: 1499— 1750, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 289-93.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

33

Potential readers might have been drawn from all who could read—from bourgeois professional classes, artisans, lawyers, apothecaries, barbers, and mere clerks, as well as from elite clientele. In the 1530s and 1540s Calvin’s promotion of Scripture in the north and east implies general literacy in these regions.22 On the other hand, literacy in southern and western France surely lagged behind. At Languedoc in the 1570s and 1590s, for example, only 3 to 10 percent of the peasants could sign their names.23 Nonetheless, the first printing of Petrarch’s Rime sparse outside of Italy occurred in France at the press of Jean de Tournes in Lyon in 1545, and Guglielmo Rovillio reprinted it at Lyon in 1550 with the com¬ mentary of Antonio Brucioli, a supporter of Lutheran reform. Higher general rates of literacy in England suggest that native sonnet collections of the 1590s might have found a wider general readership than their Italian or French counterparts. English literacy climbed from 11-26 percent of the rural male population who signed the Oath of the King’s Succession in 1534, to 30 percent of the rural males and 78 per¬ cent of London males who signed the Protestation Oath in 1641.24 This apparent rise was by no means steady or cumulative, nor did different social groups register constant levels of proficiency in relation to one another. Irregular fluctuations in schooling chart instead a general un¬ evenness, from rapid progress in the 1520s and 1530s to regression in the 1540s and 1550s, from renewed energies in the 1560s and 1570s to recession and decline between 1580 and 1610, and finally to the Stuart recovery of the 1620s. The ideological push of English Protestantism with its injunction to read Scripture and the utilitarian pull of commer¬ cial activity with its summons to record business transactions likewise inflect various patterns of acceleration and arrest. What kinds of books most frequently surfaced in the urban centers of Italy, France, and England from 1460 to 1600? With a good deal of variation affecting specific titles throughout Europe, theological and de¬ votional works comprised 45 percent of the volumes printed before the Reformation, books on law just over 10 percent, and scientific, pseudo¬ scientific, and technological manuals about 10 percent; the remaining

22See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modem France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 145-70. 23Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: Uni¬ versity of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 162-63. 24David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 64-72, 165-74. For the broad dissem¬ ination of popular literature in cheap print through English rural society see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in SeventeenthCentury England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), pp. 9-12, 19-44.

34

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

3°-35 Percent consisted of classical, medieval, or contemporary liter¬ ature.25 Seventy-seven percent of incunabula was in Latin, encompassing most titles in theology, law, and science; in the vernacular, the number of editions of modern literary texts regularly exceeded that of the an¬ cient classics. In Italy, the number of editions of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio collectively equalled that of all other vernacular literature, including romances and tales, facetiae and sensationalized histories, po¬ etic anthologies, and translations of the classics.26 Printers’ lists do not necessarily indicate which texts consumers actu¬ ally bought and read. For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence, post mortem inventories of books possessed by middle-class lawyers, notaries, merchants, and artisans permit some assessment.27 Throughout this pe¬ riod Dante remains among the top five authors cited in these inventories, but his status diminishes as Petrarch’s rises. Petrarch emerges from twenty-fourth position between 1413 and 1453 to first between 1467 and 1520, whereas Dante slips from first position to third. Petrarch’s ascen¬ dance during the Medici years balances Boccaccio’s decline from third position at the beginning of the fifteenth century to twelfth at the end of the sixteenth century. Throughout the period from 1531 to 1608 Petrarch retains an edge over Dante. Only Ariosto rivals Petrarch in pop¬ ularity from 1531 to 1570. In some respects the popularity of poetry throughout Italy appears to compensate for a decline in formal religious and theological publication during the Counter-Reformation. Notably at this time a bizarre spiritu¬ alizing redaction of the Rime sparse by the Franciscan friar Girolamo Malipiero, Il Petrarca spirituale, first published in 1536, underwent six popular editions (1545-87) and it initiated a flood of imitations, including Ste¬ fano Colonna’s I sonnetti, le canzoni, et i triomphi di M. Laura in risposta di M. Francesco Petrarca (1552). This remarkably derivative sequence rewrote Petrarch’s amatory complaints as a series of exemplary replies by the virtuous Laura.28 The priorities of a contemporaneous readership outside of Italy were vastly different. In Paris and Amiens sixteenth-century inventories dis- ’Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing i45°-I8°°> trans. David Gerard (London: N.L.B., 1976), p. 249; and Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading, pp. 133-34. 2bSusan Noakes, “The Development of the Book Market in Late Quattrocento Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981): 23-55, PP- 28-29; Amadeo Quondam, Mercanzia d’onore/Mercanzia d’utile” in Libri, editori, e pubblico nell’Europa moderna, ed. Armando Petrucci (Bari: Laterza, 1977), pp. 66-68. -7Christian Bec, Les livres des florentins, 1413—1608 (Florence: Olschki, 1984), pp. 33, 49, 61, 98-101. ~8For pertinent remarks, see Roche, Petrarch, pp. 91—96.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

35

close that a merchant’s or artisan’s library might include a vernacular Golden Legend, a translated Bible, a Book of Hours, and a technical man¬ ual relating to the owner’s trade.29 Libraries among comparable classes in England appear better stocked than French ones, but even where we might reasonably expect rich literary holdings, we can be disappointed. A recently recovered seventeenth-century catalog of the Sidney family library at Penshurst suggests that Henry Sidney and his talented offspring Philip, Mary, and Robert consistently favored books of history, law, and current events over poetry and fiction, reflecting their preoccupation with affairs of state, political advancement, and matters of public con¬ sequence rather than belles lettres.30 In these contexts of book production, book ownership, literacy, and reading preferences throughout Europe, Petrarch’s poetry became com¬ monplace or controversial to the extent that it could be seen to occu¬ py one or another side of a public issue. In a climate of religious and political controversy, every issue counts, and fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury commentators on the Rime sparse record their understandings of them with sometimes combative intensity. What one articulates as Pe¬ trarch’s point of view, another contests. While most commentators pur¬ sued their work as largely commercial ventures, and some concocted controversy in order to market their products for certain readerships, their attitudes toward these concerns—even when they might seem blandly conventional—register important shifts in social thought and popular opinion. As individual commentators explore each text from the horizon of their own understanding, they disclose a wealth of informa¬ tion about contemporary attitudes toward religion, art, moral conduct, specific roles assigned to gender and class, and concrete ideas about politics and political action. In this light the commentators fashion and construct Petrarch’s social and political involvement with monarchical forms of government and ways of life other than Florentine republicanism; his insertion of public, professional, and amatory affairs into the narrative of his poetry; his rhetorical skill in discursive cultural relation to that of other canonized 29See Henri Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs, et société è Paris au XVIP siècle, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1969), pp. 319-26; and Henri Jean Martin, “What Parisians Read in the Sixteenth Century,” in French Humanism: 1470—1600, ed. Werner Gundersheimer (London: Macmil¬ lan, 1969), pp. 131-45; and Albert Gabarre, Le livre dans la société amiénoise du XVI siècle (Louvain: Naewelaerts, 1971), pp. 118-26. 3,)Germaine Warkentin, “Sidney’s Authors” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed. Michael J. B. Allen et al. (New York: AMS, 1990), pp. 75-82. For social controversies governing bookselling and the literary marketplace in early modern England, with an emphasis on gendered rhetoric, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, !993)> PP- 57-95-

36

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

authors; and his proto-Protestant discovery of scriptural meaning, his rejection of corrupt Church practices, and his growing emphasis on in¬ ner spiritual reform. If these themes do not seem always to match those of the historical author or the poems that he wrote, they do adumbrate— as succeeding chapters will show—major themes of Petrarch’s later im¬ itators. In this way the sheer variety of commentary helps to account for the interest with which the Rime sparse were transported across time and historical circumstances from fourteenth-century Avignon to sixteenthcentury Florence, over the class structures of early modern society and material conditions of daily living, beyond the social and political in¬ stitutions and cultural differences inscribed in them, into their own constantly changing environment and ultimately into other milieus throughout Italy and the emerging nations of Western Europe.

Authorizing Monarchism: Antonio da Tempo, Francesco Filelfo, and Hieronimo Squarzafico The earliest Florentine biographies of Petrarch were written by Filippo Villani (1381), Pier Paolo Vergerio (1397), Leonardo Bruni (1436), and Giannozzo Manetti (1440s). They emphasize the eloquence of his Latin prose and verse, the example of his scholarly accomplishments, and the piety of his Christian sentiments, but they offer relatively few comments on the Rime sparse or Trionfi as models for Italian poetry. Above all they reclaim Petrarch’s Florentine ancestry and depict him as sympathetic to the republican spirit of civic humanism. They focus on the poet’s earliest years in Arezzo, his nostalgia for Italy while in Provence, his travels through Italy, his residence in Milan, Parma, Venice, and Padua, and his discoveries of lost works by Cicero and Livy, with their consequent in¬ sights about the Roman Republic. In a letter written shortly after Pe¬ trarch’s death on 20 July 1374, perhaps in an effort to secure editorial rights over the poet’s unpublished papers, Coluccio Salutati proclaims Petrarch “not just the shining splendor of Florence, but the light of all Italy, the light of our age.”31 Of his vernacular poetry, Salutati barely mentions in passing that “his rhymes tickle the ears of the common people” (Thompson-Nagel 9). Leonardo Bruni’s influential “Life of Petrarch” (1436) represents Pe-

31 Latin text in Vite, ed. Solerti; translated in Thompson and Nagel, Three Crowns, p. 9. For Salutati’s motives see Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. 183-89.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

37

trarch from a quite different historical perspective.32 In Bruni’s view, Petrarch initiated methods of humanist philology that, “having grown since then, . . . have reached their present heights” (Thompson-Nagel 75). His greatest discoveries teach us that Rome’s golden age coincided with its republican liberty: It can be said that letters and the study of Latin went hand in hand with the state of the Roman Republic, since it increased until the age of Cicero; and then after the Roman people lost their liberty in the rule of the em¬ perors, who did not even stop at killing and ruining highly regarded men, the good disposition of studies and letters perished altogether with the good state of the city of Rome. (76)

Petrarch did not have the good fortune to experience republican free¬ dom. Strapped economically, he served popes and princes in order to win their patronage, “not so much by his own choice as constrained to it” (77). He nonetheless found solace by avoiding factional dispute—he was “wise and prudent in choosing the quiet and leisurely life” (82) — and he maintained a constant and consistent point of view with regard to politics: “He did not keep changing and modifying his position like Dante” (82). Commentaries on the Rime sparse written under the auspices of mo¬ narchical governments in northern Italy were more precise than the Flor¬ entine biographies in interpreting Petrarch’s Italian poetry. The earliest ones appeared in Padua, Milan, and Venice not as products of historical scholarship or republican fervor, but as constructions of an aristocratic humanism initiated at ducal courts, or of a commercial enterprise man¬ aged within the orbit of Ghibelline monarchism and Venetian oligarchy. The commentaries of Antonio da Tempo at Padua (written before 1440, published 1477), Francesco Filelfo at Milan (written 1445-47, published 1476), and Hieronimo Squarzafico at Venice (written after 1476, pub¬ lished 1484) expound ideological imperatives at odds with the Floren¬ tine view of Petrarch, each supporting claims sympathetic to autocratic interests. The first represents Petrarch from the perspective of Paduan humanism, amenable to the patronage and protection of its local Ghib¬ elline lord; the second represents Petrarch from the perspective of Mil¬ anese imperialism, celebratory of an Italy potentially united under

32For this perspective see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 254-63. For the rhetoric of exemplarity that shapes humanist biographies of Petrarch, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History (Ithaca: Cor¬ nell University Press, 1990), pp. 19-25 and 31-62.

38

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Visconti rule; the third represents Petrarch for a commercial readership content with the status quo of Venetian prosperity. Each of these commentators could claim a special relationship with the historical Petrarch who spent the longest period of his Italian resi¬ dence in their territories. From 1353 to 1361 Petrarch served the Vis¬ conti of Milan; in 1361 he moved to Padua and then to Venice where the senate gave him a palace; after 1368 he settled in Padua and Arqua where Francesco da Carrara, the despotic lord of Padua, granted him an estate. These later years of Petrarch’s life reveal a shift in the poet’s attitudes about the respective merits of republican government and mo¬ narchical rule. When he began his epic Africa in 1338, he praised the republican age of Cato as an era of liberty and heroic achievement: “Post haec meliora sequuntur / Tempora, et hinc nostri libertas incipit evi’’ ‘Then better times / ensued; our age of liberty began’ (Africa 3.773-74: Bergin trans., 3.984-85). After Cola di Rienzi’s republican experiment failed at Rome in 1347-50, Petrarch abandoned his Africa. More and more he came to support the imperial cause of monarchical rulers in northern Italy. By 1355 he was commending Emperor Charles IV as Italy’s—and Europe’s—greatest hope. Finally in

1368 he answered

Francesco da Carrara’s request to continue De viris illustribus in praise of kings and the nobility. Petrarch’s monarchism surely pleased the lords of northern Italy who would recruit Petrarch’s literary prestige to strengthen their own authority as enlightened rulers.33 The Carrara lords, Petrarch’s benefactors in the last years of his life, typify the situation.34 They ruled over Padua from 1318 until 1405 when the city, long a buffer between Milan and Venice, fell to the latter. Jacopo da Carrara, who arranged for Petrarch to receive a canonry in the Padua cathedral in April 1349, was assassinated in December 1350. His son, Francesco, invited Petrarch back to Padua in 1367, asking the poet to accompany him to Udine to petition Emperor Charles IV for aid against the Visconti. For this favor he awarded Petrarch a home at Arqua. When boundary disputes between Padua and Venice led to war in 1372-73» Petrarch accompanied the latter’s heir, Francesco Novello, to Venice to make submission before the Senate. After Petrarch’s death, however, Venice stood by as Padua fell to Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1388. By 1399 Padua had sued for peace with Milan and even boasted about its pro33Baron, Crisis, pp. 54-58, 119-24, and From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago: Univer¬ sity of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 34-40. For Petrarch’s historiographic rhetoric see Albert Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux’,” Stanford Italian Review 10 (1991): 5-44. 34Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 82, 96, 213, 240-43.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

39

Visconti supporters who propagandized for a unified Italy. When Giangaleazzo died unexpectedly in 1402, Padua was ripe for takeover by Venice. In 1405 Padua became a provincial town in the Venetian terra firma. Under the suzerainty of Venice, an oligarchy whose government and policies resembled those of an autocratic monarchy, Paduan hu¬ manism celebrated the benefits of military security, economic prosperity, artistic patronage, and efficient government available in a monarchy. Antonio da Tempo’s commentary on the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta echoes this ideology in its gloss on individual poems. The work can scarcely precede the 1420s, as it registers a sense of its historical distance from Petrarch by presenting him as first in a now established line of successors: “& hebbe tanta grazia dingegno che fu il primo che questi sublimi studii lungho tempo caduti in obliuione riuoco a luce” ‘And he had such an endowment of wit that he was the first who called back to light these sublime pursuits that had long ago fallen into oblivion’ (Aiir) Surely Antonio’s commentary was complete before the mid-i440s when Filelfo undertook to revise it, and it circulated randomly in manuscript before it was printed in quarto with Roman type by Domenico Siliprandi at Venice in 1477.35 Siliprandi affirms that he has reorganized, and in some cases modified, Antonio’s glosses with a great deal of care and effort: ‘‘La qual opera havendola io Domenico fiolo de Gasparo Sili¬ prandi trovata sparsa corno la foglia nel automno dal vento & cum gran fatica & lucubratione recolta” ‘Which text I, Domenico, son of Gasparo Siliprandi, have found scattered like autumn leaves by the wind and have collected with a great deal of labor and effort’ (Air). It is clearly not the work of a more famous Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan Ghibelline born around 1300 who composed an influential treatise on versification, De rithimis vulgaribus, written in 1332 and still held in esteem when it was printed at Venice in 1509.36 The Antonio who annotated Petrarch’s So¬ netti Canzone àf Triumphi identifies himself in his remarks on sonnet 1 as ‘Tudice ne la cita de Padoa” ‘A judge in the city of Padua’ (Avi1). Ad¬ dressing his work ‘‘a te Signor Alberto de la nobile famiglia de la Sellala” ‘to you, Signor Alberto, of the noble family of La Scala’ (Avi'), the com¬ mentator pays respect to contemporary descendants of Regina della Scala, the wife of Bernabo Visconti, the mother of Giangaleazzo, and the

35Carlo Dionisotti, “Fortuna del Petrarca nel ’4°°>” Italia medioevale e umanistica 17 (t974): 61-113, P- 88. Nicholas Mann reports on a partial manuscript in the Philipps collection [9477] dated 1426, “Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 18 (1975): 138-527, pp. 338-39. 36Nino Quarta speculates that its publisher chose the name “Antonio da Tempo” to claim the eye-witness credibility of Petrarch’s contemporary, I commentatori quattrocentisti del Petrarca (Naples: A. Tessitore, 1904), pp. 20-22, 49-54-

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

4°

grandmother of Filippo Maria. Though the circumstances of its com¬ position are unclear, its critical bias toward Visconti monarchism and its rejection of Bruni’s Florentine republicanism are manifest. From Antonio’s perspective the Rime sparse dramatize Petrarch’s career as an exemplary public servant who advances the cause of central gov¬ ernment in northern Italy. The commentator’s prefatory “Life of Pe¬ trarch” draws extensively from earlier Florentine biographies by Pier Candido Decembrio and Leonardo Aretino, but it scrupulously replaces their laudatory references to the Florentine Republic with a different assessment of Petrarch’s character, “per excitare qualunque altro de mazor doctrina Sc facundia” ‘to stimulate others to think about his greater teaching and productivity’ (Avir). Thus Antonio represents the poet as a moral hero, a trusted confidant of popes and kings, one who performed excellent service and preserved his own integrity. Petrarch’s love for Laura hardly kept him from public affairs. Antonio cites an apocryphal story that Pope Urban V offered the poet a dispensation to marry while yet retaining his benefices, but that Petrarch refused on grounds of con¬ science: E quantunque li volse esser data per donna ad instantia di Papa Urbano quinto il qual lui singularmente amava concedendoli di tenere con la donna li beneficii insieme non volse mai consentire dicendo chel fructo chel prendea de amore a scrivere dappoi che la cosa amata consequito hauesse tutto se perderla. (Aii'j

Even though he wished to marry, at the urging of Pope Urban V who held him in the highest esteem, allowing him to retain his benefices while taking a wife, he refused, saying that the fruit he earned from writing about love would be lost after he had obtained what he wanted.

Antonio discloses Petrarch’s hidden motivation—that poetry derives from lack, which marriage would cancel—but even this disclosure ad¬ vances the poet’s image as a loyal public servant. By valuing his literary skills above amatory fulfillment, Petrarch succeeds as a good citizen; he devotes his talent to the public weal. In Antonio’s narrative, Petrarch spends his happiest, most productive years serving the Visconti in Milan and Parma:

Da principi & signori temporali da cardinali Sc papi era la notizia sua desid¬ erata infra i quali magiormente dal magnanimo Sc inclito bisconti Galeazo alhora di Milano duca da lui per littere evocato alquanto tempo sotto titolo di suo consiglierò dimoro 8c tal volta in Milano e quando a Parma: ma a

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

41

Milano per la magior parte hebbe la sua habitatione in uilla longo de la cita miglia, iii. (Aiiii') He was called upon to serve by princes and lords and by cardinals and popes, and among them chiefly the generous and magnanimous Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan; summoned by the latter, Petrarch remained for a while with the title of counselor, sometimes at Milan, often at Parma; but for the most part at Milan he lived in a summer home three miles away from the city.

Petrarch’s attachment to the Visconti and his devotion to their cause fulfil a Christian Stoicism in his nature. He renounces honor, wealth, and freedom to pursue his literary career under the protection of an absolute ruler. Antonio’s profile assumes that the competing claims of a republican government would have sapped Petrarch’s energies, but that the centralized command of the Visconti government insured stability, efficient rule, and prosperity. Above all, the Visconti offered patronage. Petrarch could climb upon the shoulders of his Italian predecessors be¬ cause he enjoyed Milanese advantages. The commentary of Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481) builds upon these assumptions. Filelfo served Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, who commis¬ sioned his annotations on Petrarch’s Rime in the mid-1440s. His gloss on sonnet 8 refers to Leonardo Bruni, who died on 9 March 1445, as deceased (“Leonardo . . . soleua chiamare’’

‘Leonardo used to call,’

nv), thus implying its subsequent composition. Filippo Maria’s motives for sponsoring this commentary were to identify Petrarch as a beneficiary of Viscontean patronage, but Filelfo’s motives for responding were evi¬ dently to strengthen his own standing at the Milanese court.37 Even in this regard Filelfo sees himself inheriting the mantle worn by Petrarch in an earlier generation. Not only does he fashion his own social identity upon Petrarch’s precedent, but he also discovers an immense gratifica¬ tion in reenacting his predecessor’s career at the Visconti court. This reenactment provides Filelfo with the security he had sought throughout his own long career. Born at Tolentine in 1398, he had taught rhetoric at Padua, Vicenza, Venice, and Bologna, and had studied Greek with Chrysoloras at Constantinople. He settled in Florence in 1429, but upon Cosimo’s election in 1434 he was banished for his align¬ ment with the anti-Medicean Albizzi faction. Exile from Florence in the 1430s soured his ideas about republican government just as surely as his acceptance in Milan in the 1440s disposed him to celebrate Viscontean rule. After Filippo Maria’s death on 13 August 1447, Filelfo abandoned 37Dionisotti, “Fortuna” pp. 78-79; for biographical information, see Diana Robin, Filelfo in Milan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 12-15, 77.

42

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

his commentary on the Rime sparse. When Francesco Sforza succeeded to the ducal throne in 1450, Filelfo joined his retinue and expediently began an epic Sphortias, modeled partly on Petrarch’s Africa. In 1471 he moved to Rome as secretary to Pope Sixtus IV, and then within the decade to Florence when Lorenzo de’ Medici, the son of his old enemy, offered him the chair of Greek at the Florentine Studium. He died there a few months later. Filelfo’s commentary, completed only as far as Petrarch’s sonnet 136, reinterprets Bruni’s link between Florentine politics and literary great¬ ness. Whereas Bruni associated eloquence with republican freedom, Fi¬ lelfo equates it with monarchical power. In dedicating his commentary to Filippo Maria, Filelfo views as part of his task the need to inspire higher thought, noble action, patriotic sentiment, and devoted service to the state, “dicendo tanto essere piu laudabile lopra quanto sotto leg¬ giera scorza grave medolla si nasconde’’ ‘saying that the text is so much more praiseworthy as serious substance is hidden beneath a pleasing exterior’ (2V). His commentary should benefit not just the educated few who can read classical texts, but the illiterate populace who mill about at public readings: “Ma perche possa forsi essere opinioni di piu gente il presente volume per la magior parte inteso’’ ‘So that the present vol¬ ume can be understood by the greater part of more people’ (2V). For the Visconti ruler whom it addresses directly, the commentary can strengthen claims to sovereignty wherever Petrarch’s language is spoken. Filelfo knows, however, that Filippo Maria can spare little time reading Petrarch’s poetry. He therefore limits his commentary to succinct les¬ sons, memorable and easily transferable to concrete situations: “Ma non manco a tua sublimità in governi 8c regimenti amplissimi 8c molto degni occupata dovere essere caro se quanto per se stessi legiermente inten¬ dere si potrà per me non sia in prolixita di commento dilatato” ‘For your highness occupied in governing, it should be valuable if I do not elaborate through prolixity whatever can be easily understood’ (2V). In this way Filelfo privileges an audience whose influence, prestige, and achievement he is proud to augment.38 Filelfo professes to paraphrase and improve upon Antonio da Tempo’s annotations, supplementing their details with scholarly references to classical texts, and sharpening their claims about Petrarch’s succession from poets of the Roman Empire. He did not circulate his commentary very widely in manuscript form, perhaps because its praise of the Visconti

38On Filelfo’s philological motives, see Ezio Raimondi, “Francesco Filelfo interprete del Canzoniere,” Studi petrarcheschi 3 (1950): 143-64, pp. 144-51; on his audience see Luigi Baldacci, Il Petrarchismo italiano nel cinquecento (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957), pp.

55-59-

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

43

seemed inappropriate after Lodovico Sforza seized power. It was even¬ tually printed in Roman type in a folio edition of Petrarch’s Sonetti et cannone (1476, reissued in 1478 and 1481) at Bologna, a university city whose ruling Bentivoglio family had distinct ties with both Milan and the papacy of Sixtus IV.39 Within a generation Hieronimo Squarzafico completed Filelfo’s com¬ mentary and published both in folio with large Gothic type at Verona in 1484. Squarzafico, later an editor of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1491) and author of an important “Life of Boccaccio’’ (1490), took pains to reproduce Petrarch’s linguistic peculiarities as best he could, and the result is the most accurate text of the Rime sparse e Trionfi before Bembo’s Aldine edition.40 Like Filelfo, Squarzafico follows Antonio da Tempo’s gloss, but he does so even more slavishly. His reluctance to depart from this precedent suggests that the ideological view of Petrarch established at Padua earlier in the century prevailed throughout northern Italy. At a later date Squarzafico reinforced his own Paduan and Venetian sympathies. In 1501 he lent his efforts to a second collective edition of Petrarch’s Latin works, published at Venice by Andrea Torresani, the father-in-law of Aldus Manutius. To this edition Squarzafico contributed his own Latin vita Petrarchae, but this vita acknowledges a strong debt to the work of Pier Paolo Vergerio (1351-1444) who had lived at Padua in 1390-1404.41 In addition to writing a De monarchia (ca. 1400) for Francesco Novello Carrara, Vergerio devoted himself to the legacy of Petrarch. Rescuing Africa from the oblivion to which Petrarch had con¬ signed it, he edited and circulated the poem in the 1390s. To him Pe¬ trarch’s

attitude

toward

the

Roman

Republic

must

have

seemed

ambiguous at best as, on the one hand, Africa celebrates the republican age of Cato and, on the other, it applauds imperial absolutism. Vergerio also composed a “Life of Petrarch’’ (1397), likewise for Francesco Nov¬ ello Carrara, though it amounts to little more than a grammatically re¬ vised version of Petrarch’s own “Letter to Posterity’’ with third-person verbs instead of first-person ones. In his Vita Squarzafico confesses his indebtedness to Vergerio, both for the latter’s curatorship of Petrarch’s Latin texts and for his perfunc¬ tory Vita. For responses to Africa by Petrarch’s contemporaries, for ex¬ ample, Squarzafico summons the testimony of Vergerio: “Carmina suae Africae cantare coeperunt, protinus cum audivit, lacrimas emisit, rogans ne ulterius procederent. . . . Vergerius non minus dare hoc demonstrare

39Dionisotti, “Fortuna,” pp. 78-86. 40Dionisotti, “Fortuna,” pp. 89-90. 41 For Vergerio in Padua see Baron, Crisis, pp. 126-34.

44

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

videtur” ‘They began to recite verses of his Africa; as soon as the audi¬ ence heard them, it shed tears, entreating him to proceed no further. Vergerio seems no less clearly to describe this reception’ (Solerti ed.,

p. 359). Squarzafico follows Vergerio in ordering the details, though he hesitates to paraphrase Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity’’ so closely. He meanwhile celebrates Petrarch’s dealings with Venice more elaborately than earlier biographers: “Venetiis cum Andrea Dandulo, cum Michaele Celso et Marino Falerio Venetiarum ducibus, et cum aliis multis patritiis et doctis viris haud parvam duxit consuetudinem, ut ex epistolis eius et aliorum multorum videri potest’’ ‘With Andrea Dandulo, Michele Celso, and Marino Falerio, Venetian leaders, and with many other patrons and learned men, he adopted this not insignificant custom, as can be seen from his letters and those of many others’ (Solerti ed., p. 354). Squar¬ zafico’s life of Petrarch thus reaffirms the poet’s loyalty to northern It¬ aly’s principates, dukedoms, and oligarchies, now incarnated in the patrician class of Venice. The joint commentary of Filelfo and Squarzafico, prefaced by Antonio da Tempo’s “Life of Petrarch,’’ was reprinted ten times between i486 and 1497.42 In 1503 it finally appeared alongside Antonio da Tempo’s commentary in an edition published by Albertino da Lissona at Venice to compete with Bembo’s Aldine text that had appeared two years ear¬ lier. Between 1507 and 1522 eight subsequent editions printed all three commentaries side by side. Until 1525, therefore, the commentaries of Antonio, Filelfo, and Squarzafico dominated editions of Petrarch’s Ital¬ ian verse. Either singly or in combination they accompanied twenty-four printings of the Li canzoneti del Petrarcha between 1476 and 1522, while without them only fifteen printings of the Rime sparse e Trionfi appeared before 1525. Among these printings, the chief competitors for Anto¬ nio’s, Filelfo’s, and Squarzafico’s texts were five unannotated Aldine edi¬ tions (1501, 1514, 1521, 1533, 1546), the first supervised by Pietro Bembo, and four unannotated editions published by Philippo di Giunta at Florence between 1504 and 1522. Meanwhile, some unpublished commentaries on Petrarch’s poetry doubtless circulated in manuscript form, amid reports of others planned or currently in progress. Francesco Patrizi at Siena in the fifteenth cen¬ tury, Girolamo Avogadro degli Azzoni at Ferrara in 1513, and Antonio da Canal at Venice in 1516 had compiled detailed notes on the Rime sparse in manuscript, while at Venice Bembo’s disciples, Lodovico Beccadelli and Trifone Gabriele, circulated their ideas about Petrarch in 42Details in Fowler, Cornell University Catalogue, pp. 75-92.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

45

public lectures.43 The former announced a publication that never ap¬ peared, while the latter refrained from publication altogether. In the absence of these texts we may conclude that the monarchical attitudes of Antonio, Filelfo, and Squarzafico shaped the reception of the Rime sparse in the early sixteenth century. Markedly different from Florentine constructions of Petrarch as a civic humanist in the republican mold, and largely unconcerned about Petrarch’s achievement as a Latinist in either prose or poetry, whether literary, scholarly, political, or philo¬ sophical, these commentaries represent Petrarch as a figure at home in the expedient courtly, monarchical, hedonistic world of northern Italy. The official Florentine view of Petrarch’s republican austerity and Cicer¬ onian integrity counts for little in these editions, just as it would mean little to the reception of Petrarch at the monarchical courts of Spain, France, and England later in the sixteenth century.

Authorizing Narrative: Alessandro Vellutello At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Italy’s political, social, and economic conditions changed dramatically. The French expeditions of 1494 and 1499 devastated Tuscany and Naples; Spain’s appropriation of Naples in 1503 and its repeated incursions into the peninsula weakened Italian unity; the contest between France and Spain for control first of Naples, then of Lombardy, depleted hope. Internal conflict between Florence and Pisa in 1494-1509, the papal designs of Alexander VI and Julius II upon Romagna in 1491-1501 and 1506-10, and the League of Cambrai (1508) of most Italian city-states against Venice turned Northern Italy into a land of strife. With political turmoil came social and economic upheavals. Their effects upon Petrarch’s Italian readership called for new modes of commentary on the Rime sparse, modes that would respond not only to the crisis of Italy’s cultural identity amid in¬ ternal conflict, but also to the philosophical and theological questioning occasioned by late humanist and early Reformation thought. Alessandro Vellutello supplied a paradigm for these approaches. Vellutello was born of a prominent family at Lucca, emigrated to Milan and then to Venice in the 1520s, and became active at the press of Giovanni Antonio da Sabbio.44 There he published Le volgari opere del

43Dionisotti, “Fortuna,” p. 70. 44Gino Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo: Studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale al “Canzoniere” (Padua: Antenore, 1992), pp. 58-88; Baldacci, Il Petrarchismo, pp. 59-62.

46

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Petrarca in 1525 in quarto with neat Italic type. His other publications include a preface to a comedy by the Bolognese Antonio Ricchi, I tre tiranni, which examines classical models for the play (1530); an edition of Virgil with Servius’s commentary (1534); and his own annotations on Dante’s Commedia, greatly indebted to Cristoforo Landino (1554). Vellutello’s approach to Petrarch’s Rime sparse e Trionfi situates their literary values in a narrative and dramatic context that activates a new set of social, cultural, literary, and political constructions. By no means a learned humanist or professional scholar, Vellutello upon arriving in Venice initiated a friendship with Bembo. Their mutual friend Niccolò Delfino reports that Bembo provided many suggestions for Vellutello’s commentary.45 The relationship soon soured over Vellutello’s rejection of Petrarch’s autograph manuscript (Vat. Lat. 3195) as authoritative. Previously on the margins of Bembo’s circle, Vellutello came to be denounced by the group’s leaders, Lodovico Beccadelli and Trifone Gabriele, for heretically discrediting their master’s Aldine edi¬ tion. Equally criticized was a shadow of linguistic heterodoxy that dark¬ ened Vellutello’s writing. His own style remains by turns rough and clotted, even though in successive editions of his work Vellutello modi¬ fied its diction and syntax to accord with precepts of Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua. The latter, published in September 1525, one month after Vellutello’s first edition (August 1525), had already circulated in large portions of manuscript for several years, and its principles were well known. In his edition of Dante published a decade after Bembo’s death (1554), Vellutello’s antagonism to the Prose would emerge more clearly in his deliberate flouting of its precepts.46 Like Bruni, Aaitonio da Tempo, Filelfo, and Squarzafico before him, Vellutello announces strong convictions about the meaning of Petrarch’s poetry, and he inscribes them directly in his commentary. Whereas his predecessors served the aims of Florentine republicanism, Paduan mon¬ archism, Milanese absolutism, or Venetian oligarchy, however, Vellutello serves the aims of a purely commercial self-interest. Unlike his prede¬ cessors in submission to Florence, Padua, Milan, or Venice, Vellutello professes an ideological detachment that underwrites the claims of Ve¬ netian humanism.47 He celebrates an abstract ideal of Italian cultural unity, one that is at odds with both the local civic humanism of Florence and the expansionist ducal absolutism of Milan. He imbibes classical

45On this relationship see Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo, pp. 71-79. 46Parker, Commentary and Ideology, pp. 119—21, 196-97. 47For these claims see Margaret King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 174-92.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

47

values, but only as a supplement to contemporary values and pragmatic concerns. He prefers Aristotelian logic, applied judgment, and mate¬ rial realism to Platonic dialectic, speculative judgment, and metaphysical idealism, but only so long as they take no precedence over practical interests. Vellutello’s major contribution is to reorder the sequence of poems in the Rime sparse. To establish a new arrangement that squares with known events in the author’s public life, Vellutello appeals to the au¬ thority of history, ethnography, and Petrarch’s own biography. Fashion¬ ing for himself the ethos of a cultural anthropologist, he selects his information from accounts in Petrarch’s letters and from the writings of Petrarch’s contemporaries, but he also relies upon his own personal ex¬ perience, his travels in Petrarch’s footsteps throughout Avignon and Vaucluse, and his interviews with descendants of Petrarch’s intimates. He judiciously transcribes their texts and conversations, maps their geo¬ graphical boundaries, constructs genealogies that link them with his sub¬ ject, and uses them to establish a rapport with the otherness of Petrarch. His claim to validity rests upon an interpretation of the past as it is recorded in Petrarch’s poetry. Vellutello’s commentary develops as a narrative that seeks to confer continuity upon discontinuity, coherence upon incoherence, through a web of words spun over Petrarch’s unspoken assumptions. Thus it con¬ structs an alternative fiction to explain the record of Petrarch’s life, a version of the Rime sparse whose contestability draws every succeeding commentator into debate. Either implicitly or explicitly editors and com¬ mentators who follow Vellutello refine his insights, argue his assump¬ tions, expand his evidence, and overturn his conclusions. His influence flows in two directions. The first encourages philosophical and rhetorical readings that would extract complex and often contradictory meanings from Petrarch’s text, as do the commentaries of Sylvano da Venafro (1533)’ Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (1533), and Bernardino Daniello (1541), each of whom shares an interest in humanist sources for classical and modern texts. The second encourages more or less historicized read¬ ings that would assimilate Petrarch to some relevant contemporary situ¬ ation, as do the commentaries of Fausto da Longiano (1532), Antonio Brucioli (1548), and Ludovico Castelvetro (1540s, published in 1582), each of whom shares an interest in the Protestant Reform movements of pre-Conciliar northern Italy. Vellutello adumbrates the complexity of this project in his prefatory “Life of Petrarch.’’ To establish his own standing as a credible ethnog¬ rapher and historian, Vellutello dismisses the limited biographies of Bruni, Antonio da Tempo, and Squarzafico and he rejects the faulty

48

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

biographical claims of Filelfo,

a similitudine di ciechi da simil guida

condotti, sono con quella in una medesima fossa caduti” ‘who, like blind people guided by the blind, have tumbled into the same ditch’ (AA7V). The authority for his ideas is a more extensive reading of Petrarch’s texts and those of his contemporaries than any earlier biographer or com¬ mentator had offered: “Ma noi, che ne le altre sue opere, e ne le istorie del suo tempo habbiamo di lui molte altre cose investigato volendoli più distintamente scrivere, vi giungeremo quelle, che giudicheremo degne da non esser taciute” ‘But I who have investigated many other details about his life from his other writings and from the histories of his time, wishing to write about them with greater precision, will add here what we judge worthy of publication’ (AA7V). Vellutello claims that his reading has yielded not only more observa¬ tional detail but also a fuller, richer, more powerful sense of Petrarch’s cultural milieu. No earlier biographer, for example, had referred to the struggle for power in the Holy Roman Empire between Ludwig of Ba¬ varia and Frederick of Hapsburg in the 1320s and 1330s, but Vellutello evokes it as an appropriate frame for Petrarch’s diplomatic mission to Rome in 1337, “questo medesimo anno essendo Lodovico Bavaro vigesimo imperadore de Germani” ‘when Ludwig of Bavaria was the twen¬ tieth emperor of Germany’ (AA8V). Likewise Vellutello depicts what no earlier biographer had mentioned about Petrarch’s friendship with Philip VI, King of France, “tanto che appresso di lui pareva che fosse in grandissimo favore” ‘such that it seems he enjoyed the highest favor with him’ (AA8V). In Vellutello’s commentary on sonnet 27 and canzoni 28 and 128, Ludwig and Philip play significant roles in Petrarch’s historical drama. Vellutello balances his biography of Petrarch with a parallel “Life of Laura.” To understand Petrarch’s motivations, he examines the record of the woman who inspired the poet to act and react. Again Vellutello bases his authority on a careful reading of Petrarch’s texts and upon deductions from the poetry, but he also displays his credentials as an investigator of social, religious, and amatory mores that shape the Rime sparse. His “Life of Laura” sets the beloved in a quotidian context re¬ mote from any in current society. Its norms seem both strange and familiar, different from those of the contemporary reader, yet under¬ standable in their difference as motivations for plausible behavior. Lau¬ ra’s world constitutes the poet’s imaginative universe. Its very geography maps the coordinates of Petrarch’s literary experience. Like a good eth¬ nographer, moreover, Vellutello has visited the actual site and has con¬ versed with its present inhabitants. Their accounts of customs and conventions in Petrarch’s day yield two results.

49

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

The first comes from Vellutello’s sojourns in Avignon where he has interviewed descendants of Laura’s alleged husband, Hughes de Sade, “col quale, per due volte che in Avignone sono stato, m’è occorso sopra di tal cosa molto lungamente parlare” ‘with whom I had the opportunity to discuss her genealogy at length both times that I was in Avignon’ (BB2r)> From this information Vellutello concludes that Petrarch’s Laura could not have been “Lamette de Sade.”48 Family documents record the latter’s maturity during the reign of Louis XI in 1361-83, but Petrarch’s sonnets 211 and 336 announce that the poet met her on 6 April 1327 and that she died on 6 April 1348: Ma quello che questa opinione dimostra in tutto esser vana si è , che do¬ mandato in che tempo egli fa, che ella sia stata risponde, che secondo certo testamento, nel quale di lei si faceva memoria, che egli havea veduto, & che poi fu mandato al re Luigi ... fu di matura età, fra il LX. e

'1

LXX. anno

sopra MCCC. onde si conosce, questa essere stata diversa da quella del Poeta.

(BB2v) What argues against this opinion is that, when asked when she lived, he responds that according to a certain will he had seen that mentioned her and was recorded with King Louis . . . she came to adulthood between 136070; whence this woman is recognized to have been different from the poet’s beloved.

Vellutello pursues his quest of Laura’s identity in another direction. Re¬ ferring in sonnet 4 to “Ed or di picciol borgo un sol n’à dato” ‘And now from a small village He has given us a sun,’ in sonnet 246 to “Can¬ dida rosa nata in dure spine” ‘White rose born among hard thorns,’ and in sonnet 305 to “et vedra’vi un che sol tra l’erbe et Tacque” ‘and you will see there one who among the grass and the waters,’ he hypothesizes that she was either a commoner or of impoverished nobility and that, as implied in sonnet 8, “A pie’ de’ colli ove la bella vesta” ‘At the foot of the hills where the lovely garment,’ and sonnet 288, “d’aspri colli mir¬ ando il dolce piano / ove nacque colei” ‘gazing from the harsh hills at the sweet plain where she was born,’ Laura lived in the desolate plain between the rivers Sorgue and Durance, probably at the town of Cabrières. At this point Vellutello reproduces an extraordinary topographic relief map of Vaucluse and its environs, focusing in exaggerated detail upon the region where the Sorgue river passes through Cabrières, “la

48 A belated reaffirmation of Laura’s marriage to Hughes de Sade is Jacques Francois Paul Aldonce de Sade, Memories pour la vie de Francois Pétrarque (Amsterdam: Arskée & Mercus, 1764-67).

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

5°

qual cosa sara anchora gran lume a chi de l’opera desidera ogni senti¬ mento havere” ’which will be illuminating to whoever wishes to get a complete sense of the text’ (BB3r). Vellutello’s study of this locale gives rise to his central hypothesis about Laura’s identity and the circumstances of her meeting Petrarch. For cru¬ cial details the commentator accepts the testimony of an informant whom he met during his visit there, “la familiarità di costui hebbi io per lo mezzo di [due uomini] ... da quali, andando io d’Avignone a questo luogo per le presente cose investigare, fui amorevolissimamente accom¬ pagnato’’ ‘whose acquaintance I made through two men ... by whom I was most graciously accompanied as I went from Avignon to this region to investigate the matter at hand’ (BBzp). Not only does the informant demonstrate from parish records the birth of a Laura, daughter of Henri Chiabau, an impoverished lord of Cabrières, on 4 June 1314, but he also affirms that she died a spinster in 1348. The congruence of these dates with those of the Rime sparse impels Vellutello to question his informant further. The latter’s response takes the form of a narrative about local observances during Holy Week, and this narrative generates Vellutello’s peculiar postulate about how Petrarch met Laura. The event occurred not in the Church of Santa Chiara at Avignon, as the famous note in Petrarch’s edition of Virgil indicates, but rather on the flower-strewn plain of the Sorgue. According to custom, the inhab¬ itants of Vaucluse and Cabrières make a pilgrimage each Good Friday from the Church of Saint Varan to a monastery at Lilia. Vellutello dram¬ atizes the meeting in 1327 as Petrarch in his twenty-fourth year and Laura in her fourteenth year reach Saint Varan simultaneously and pause to rest beneath the shade of a tree: “Forse un poco per lo caminare stanca, s’era per riposarsi e rinfrescarsi sotto un fiorito arbore . . . quando dal Poeta, il quale che da Valclusa anchora a egli, per la me¬ desima cagione a Fllla andando fu in questo luogo la prima volta ve¬ duta’’ ‘Perhaps a bit tired from the journey, she paused for rest and refreshment beneath a flowering tree . . . when here she was first seen by the poet who was traveling from Vaucluse to Lilia for the same pur¬ pose’

(l'j.

Vellutello then supports his conclusion with evidence from

the poetry that celebrates the flowers (30.1), outdoor breezes (90.1), and fresh waters (126.1) encircling Laura where the Sorgue divides (66.32-33). The movement of a desire born in open, raw, untamed na¬ ture thus generates a complex psychological action. Petrarch has located his forbidden passion in this displaced paradise, a wilderness between two branches of a river that deviates from its own course, a scene of primitive, wild, uncontrolled urgency, “tutto quel giorno seguitandola, come in alcuni luoghi dell’opera vedremo, ardentissimamente infiam-

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

51

mato” ‘pursuing her the entire day, as we shall see elsewhere in the text, inflamed with a most ardent passion’ (ir). The lover gropes toward an object that he cannot, must not possess, while the beloved exacts retri¬ bution from him through scorn, disdain, and icy fire. Vellutello’s confidence that he has discovered the historical as well as moral and psychological truth about Petrarch’s Laura now leads him to his boldest conclusion: the order of poems in the Rime sparse is wrong. The reordering that Vellutello prescribes follows closely upon the chro¬ nology of Petrarch’s life as the commentator understands it. From the evidence of Petrarch’s letters and other biographical sources, Vellutello charts major events in the poet’s life and to them he matches the Rime sparse as though they recount their author’s experience. The new order that he prescribes projects a tighter, more controlled narrative that traces the poet’s personal, professional, and political development dur¬ ing four decades. To Aldus Manutius’s division of the poems into two sections, in vita di Laura and in morte di Laura, Vellutello adds a third section of occasional poetry that begins with the patriotic canzone 128, “Italia mia,’’ presents sonnets 136-38 on the Babylonian captivity of the papacy at Avignon, and includes other poems that reflect contemporary issues. (See the Appendix.) Although most later editors rejected this arrangement (the few ex¬ ceptions following Vellutello’s order without his commentary were published at Venice in 1531, 1537, 1548, and 1554), Vellutello’s com¬ mentary reshaped the course of Petrarchism. The earlier commentators’ historical inaccuracies and their tendency to draw pat moral lessons from the text seemed out of step with the needs of the complex readership of Vellutello’s era. The latter’s annotations eschew moralizing sentiment and allegorical platitudes in favor of a chronological and archaeological approach to the text. They draw attention to biographical relationships between the poet and his poetry and they imply a closer connection between the voice of the speaker and that of the historical writer than earlier readers were likely to assume. They represent Petrarch as a public figure, one whose poetry grows out of his diplomatic service to popes and kings, emperors and lords, and whose philosophical reflections med¬ itate upon the political and religious crises of his age. Their reordering of the Rime sparse into a more efficient, more plausible narrative finally imposes a norm of dramatic clarity, narrative coherence, and historical verisimilitude upon the idea of a poetic sequence. With the reception of Petrarch later in the century, this figure of a political poet would matter greatly for Joachim Du Bellay and his Plèiade associates in France and for Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney in England, while the questioning and construction of Petrarch’s narrative would impel others like Ed-

52

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

mund Spenser to conceive sometimes elaborate narrative strategies for their own Petrarchan sequences.

Authorizing Rhetoric: Sylvano da Venafro, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, and Bernardino Daniello Vellutello’s edition of the Le volgari opere del Petrarcha passed through six major printings and twenty-three reprintings at nine different pub¬ lishers between 1525 and 1584. Its version of Petrarch’s life galvanized an understanding of Petrarch’s career for the rest of the sixteenth cen¬ tury. Though later commentators undid Vellutello’s rearrangement of the poems, they returned to the conventional order with a new perspec¬ tive gained from Vellutello’s conjectures. Sylvano da Venafro, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, and Bernardino Daniello offer close rhetorical read¬ ings of Petrarch’s text. Frequently, as with Sylvano, their readings amount to modifications of readings posed by Vellutello. Gesualdo, whose commentary is the most detailed of any in the sixteenth century, takes explicit issue with Vellutello, among others, in lengthy arguments. Finally, the inspiration for Petrarch that Vellutello and his predecessors attributed to classical and Christian literature comes under sharper anal¬ ysis by both Gesualdo and Daniello. The latter especially brings a great arsenal of new classical learning to bear upon his discussion of ancient sources and analogues for Petrarch’s texts. All three pay close attention to Petrarch’s rhetorical talent. For them Petrarch is a master rhetorician whose Rime sparse constitute a perfect model for elegant and persuasive discourse. The editions of Sylvano, Gesualdo, and Daniello were above all com¬ mercial ventures. Sylvano and Gesualdo both wrote at Naples and pub¬ lished their editions in 1533, the former for a local audience, the latter for a much wider readership. The intellectual climate of Naples bears strongly upon their outlooks.49 Under Spanish rule since 1503, Naples labored to preserve its cultural identity with the rest of Italy. In 1516 Charles V inherited the crown of Aragon with the vice-regency of Naples and Sicily as well as the regency of Castile, and he brought to this ex¬ tensive realm many elaborate traditions of chivalry and ceremony from the Burgundian court in which he had grown up. The court of Naples,

49For Neapolitan humanism see Jerome Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); for art, George Hersey, Alfonso II and the Artistic Renewal of Naples (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); for the Academy, Michele Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna: Lincinio Cappelli, 1929).

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

53

so austere during the old regime, soon emulated the pageantry and dis¬ play of Spain. The Academy of Naples at first reacted against this flourish by promoting the subdued Christian humanism of its leader, Jacopo San¬ nazaro, who published his Piscatoriae and De partu virginis in 1526. Sup¬ ported by members of the nobility bound to the old dynasty, the Academy eventually took in the newer currents, opening to a greater participation by women, including Princess Caterina Cybo, Countess Giovanna d’Aragona, and Vittoria Colonna, marcioness of Pescara, who invigorated it with their deep interest in religion and theology. Against this background of elegant courtierism, poetic Platonism, redefined clas¬ sicism, and fervent religiosity, the rhetorical commentaries of Sylvano and Gesualdo resonate. Sylvano’s II Petrarca had a less direct influence on the reception of Petrarch’s Rime sparse than any other before or after it. Composed per¬ haps as early as 1527, but certainly after Vellutello’s edition of 1525, it was published in quarto with large Roman type at Naples in March 1533, after delays occasioned by turmoil following Charles V’s sack of Rome.50 Though it saw only a limited circulation in its single edition, it focused upon themes of well-bred amatory conduct that would later dominate European Petrarchism. These themes displaced the political emphases of Antonio da Tempo, Filelfo, Squarzafico, and even Vellutello, and they displayed the communal quietism that had come to hide the trauma of foreign domination in Naples. Dedicated to Philippo della Noi, prince of Salmone, Sylvano’s commentary could only herald for its dispossessed patron the compensatory benefits of courtliness, gallantry, Platonic sen¬ timent, and Christian piety. The commentary explores Petrarch’s inner life. Sylvano’s learned ref¬ erences to Latin poetry, chiefly the Roman elegists, to the philosophy of Plato and the Stoics, and to other signposts of European culture, convey a modicum of intellectual training distilled through largely conventional sixteenth-century handbooks. Sylvano’s name does not appear in the reg¬ ister of Naples’s Academy, but he no doubt followed its activities as a marginal participant, receiving and processing ideas rather than creating or initiating them.51 A letter by Giovambattista Bacchini da Modena in Gesualdo’s edition of Petrarch, in press when Sylvano’s appeared earlier the same year, mentions this commentary as an echo of “quelli scritti che sopra il Petrarca si scrissero, quando la nostra Accademia fioriua in quella Città” ‘those pages that were written about Petrarch when our

50Gino Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo, pp. 190-93; for earlier Neapolitan commentary see Belloni, pp. 215-19.

51Maylender,

Storia delle Accademie, 4:327—37-

54

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Academy flourished in that city’ (Gesualdo aiir). Principles of taste and refinement learned from the Academy provide ammunition against the occasional crudeness and irreverence of Vellutello, whose lapses Sylvano takes to task. Though Sylvano accepts some of Vellutello’s biographical judgments, he argues against any reordering of the Rime sparse and he labors to correct faulty impressions about rhetoric and religion that Vel¬ lutello had registered. Sylvano’s attraction to rhetorical form and his avoidance of politics are evident in his prefatory “Life of Petrarch.’’ Beginning as a free transla¬ tion of Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity,’’ it paraphrases the poet’s refer¬ ences to his inborn talent as a diplomat, but it omits nearly every detail about his highly public life as an emissary and also about his highly private life as a scholar. It omits, for example, the letter’s account of Petrarch’s political efforts to persuade Pope Urban V to bring the Papal See back to Rome and it drastically abridges the letter’s account of Pe¬ trarch’s service at the courts of Parma and Verona. Minimizing Pe¬ trarch’s narrative about his retreat from Avignon, Sylvano likewise reduces to a single sentence the poet’s long description of how he com¬ posed his major Latin texts at Vaucluse: “Ivi dal rustico 8c selvaggio paese invitato, la Buccolica mia con gran parte dell’Aphrica, e i libri de vita solitaria scrissi’’ ‘There, summoned by the wild rustic countryside, he wrote his Bucolics and his Vita solitaria along with a large part of Africa’ (+iiir). Petrarch’s other achievements in humanistic learning and clas¬ sical scholarship make no impact on Sylvano. For him Petrarch’s greatest talent is to use the vernacular to express amatory sentiment in a decorous style. Unlike Vellutello, who largely ignored Bembo’s commendation of Petrarch’s Tuscan locution, Sylvano expresses admiration of it. Petrarch’s Italian poetry offers a superb rhetorical model for courtly discourse. Sylvano includes a prefatory “Life of Laura’’ addressed specifically to the women at court: “Maxime per piacere alle Donne, che haurebbon caro di intendere anchor piu di quel che ne scrisse il P.” T write espe¬ cially to please the ladies who might wish to understand more about matters that Petrarch writes of ( + iiiir). Mindful of sexual strategies to control the activities of women at court, Sylvano proceeds as though he were a double agent amid gender wars. On the one hand he implies that women can use use his commentary as a handbook to calculate the strategies of potential suitors in tournaments of love. Recalling Ovid’s insistence upon fair play in the Ars Amatoria, he argues that women can¬ not respond to or circumvent their suitors’ designs without knowing them in advance: “Arma dedi Danais in Amazonas; arma supersunt, / Quae tibi dem et turmae, Penthesilea, tuae’’ T have armed the Danai against the Amazons; there remain arms which I must give to thee, Pen-

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

55

thesilea’ (Ars 3.1-2). On the other hand Sylvano designs his commentary as a handbook for men to plan their maneuvers in anticipation of wom¬ en’s responses. Again recalling Ovid, he recognizes the risk: “Quo feror insanus? quid aperto pectore in hostem / Mettor, et indicio prodor ab ipse meo?” ‘Whither am I borne in my frenzy? Why rush I with open breast against the foe and am betrayed by my own evidence?’ (3.66768). Contrary to Vellutello, Sylvano insists that Laura was a married woman and that Petrarch’s love was in potentia adulterous: “Nomolla volte assai per pudica, per casta, p[er] santa, per onesta, non gia per vergine’’ ‘Petrarch often writes of her as modest, chaste, devout, and honorable, but never as a virgin’ ( + iiiiv). Arguing vigorously for her highborn rank, he excuses her flirtation while he grants the poet license to pursue her. Laura’s rank in fact enables Petrarch’s pursuit. The lover importunes his beloved with thousands of intricate formalities while she protects her interests with corresponding ceremonies. Beneath the surface may lurk unresolved anxieties, thinly masked aggressions, displaced violence, re¬ sidual envy, and wounded pride, but the honorific code of a noble love covers all their traces. Sylvano shows how Petrarch eschews scandal and above all vulgarity by implementing this code, turning his commentary into an ars amatoria for a lover with good intentions. As his gloss upon sonnet 216 explains, it can have therapeutic effects upon Petrarch’s readers: “Siano le testimoni coloro, che in simil stato trovandosi, si sono alle volte per disfogation di lor dolori servuti di leggerlo, o ragionarlo” ‘Those people offer testimony who, finding themselves in a similar state, help themselves toward alleviating their own woes by reading about Pe¬ trarch’s and talking about them’ (clvii1). The lengthiest sixteenth-century commentary on the Rime sparse e Trionfi submitted the text to a detailed rhetorical analysis. Composed by Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, it underwent seven influential editions in quarto with reduced Italic type after its publication at Venice in July, 1533, and it was granted the prestige of appearing as the magisterial gloss on the Rerum vulgarium frammenta in the 1554 and 1581 Basel folio editions of Petrarch’s complete works. Beyond declaring his birth at the end of the fifteenth century near Gaeta at Traetto, the ancestral home of his famous mentor and blood-relative Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, Gesualdo leaves few clues to his own identity. In the mid-i520s he evi¬ dently attended Minturno’s discussions at the Academy of Naples where the latter resided after his studies at Pisa, Florence, and Rome.52 In these 5:-'Baldacci, Il Petrarchismo, pp. 62—63; Jon A. Quitslund, “Amoretti Vili and Platonic Com¬ mentaries on Petrarch,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 ( 1973b 25^—7^>

56

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

discussions Petrarch’s poetry figured as a prominent topic, and Gesualdo records what was said. The publication of his commentary, drafted per¬ haps as early as 1523 but later revised and augmented, was, like Sylvano da Venafro’s, delayed by Charles V’s assault on Rome. The only other remnants of Gesualdo’s literary activity are eleven sonnets included in an anthology of Rime di diversi eccellenti autori. Assembled by Lodovico Domenichi and printed at Venice by Gabriele Giolito in 1545, these Rime underwent several editions and provided models for imitation in Du Bellay’s Olive and Ronsard’s Les amours. Bacchini’s letter appended to Gesualdo’s commentary, already men¬ tioned for referring to Sylvano da Venafro, reveals something about the circumstances of its publication. Minturno had urged Gesualdo to pub¬ lish his work outside Naples, but while the manuscript lay at a printer’s shop in Bologna, a Modenese acquaintance of Bacchini read it and pla¬ giarized some of its best parts. The alleged plagiarist, Fausto da Longiano, rushed his own commentary into print in 1532, though, as we shall see, it bears little indebtedness to Gesualdo’s. Bacchini nonetheless uses the allegation to proclaim the superiority of Gesualdo’s work. Fausto’s commentary is too brief, full of error, and wilfully eccentric: “Ella è brevissima Sc poco o nulla espone del testo. In piu luoghi, per dir cose nuove, è diversa da la commune oppenione’’ Tt is very brief and offers little or no explication of the text. In many places, in order to assert novel claims, it diverges from commonly held opinion’ (aiiv). Gesualdo’s commentary, on the other hand, offers an extensive examination of Pe¬ trarch and it clarifies issues that would otherwise remain obscure. Gesualdo’s dedicatory letter to his aristocratic patroness, Maria di Car¬ dona, the marchioness of Palude, reveals other circumstances. Gesualdo thanks Minturno “per sua humanitate, e per quei legami di sangue, che con lui mi stringono’’ ‘for his generosity and for those ties of blood that bind me to him’ (aiiir), and he announces that Minturno will one day publish his own dialogue on Petrarch, tentatively entitled The Academy. Until then Gesualdo’s commentary may help to illuminate the Rime sparse e Trionfi: Iquali ragionamenti . . . sospinsero lui stesso a scriuerne quel Dialogo, che egli chiama Academia: nel quale non pur commenda il parlar Thoscano, e soure ogni cosa le rime del Poeta, ma dimostra quanto e quale fosse lo ’ngegno e l’arte di lui, e di quanta dottrina in ogni scientia, e di quanti ornamenti pieno il dire. (aiiiv)

pp. 272-74; Belloni adds that after 1533 Minturno wrote about Gesualdo’s advancement toward a diplomatic career; Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo, p. 204.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

57

These discussions impelled him to write a dialogue about them, which he is calling The Academy; in it he commends not only the Tuscan dialect and above all the poet’s verse, but he shows how much and in what way the latter’s wit and art functioned, and with how much learning in every field and with how many ornaments his discourse was full.

Under Minturno’s spell, Gesualdo understands the text as an endless debate between literal and figurative discourse, teeming with shifting relations among its representational and tropological components. No doubt working through the Academy’s controversies, acting out the dis¬ agreements, and perhaps trying to rival the brilliance of other disputants, Gesualdo defines his own position by arguing with actual or hypothetical adversaries. His authority is rhetoric itself and his ethos is that of a master rhetorician. He presents divergent opinions, offers reasons for each, and nudges his readers to settle the claims in their own way. Unlike other readers who propound a single strong thesis, Gesualdo offers many. The result is a long, rich, and studiously open-ended commentary on the Rime sparse e Trionfi. Minturno (1502-74) never published the dialogue on Petrarch to which Gesualdo alludes, but in 1559 he did issue his Latin De poeta libri sex, the result, he declares, of “twenty years and the best part of my life” devoted to literary scholarship (Gilbert trans., p. 274), and in 1563-64 he presented his vernacular De arte poetica: Della toscana poesia, an expan¬ sion of his Latin work with its ideas applied to Italian texts.53 These treatises disclose some assumptions that Gesualdo consciously or uncon¬ sciously accepts, rejects, echoes, or resists in his commentary. Like Bembo, whose Prose della volgar lingua exalted Petrarch four decades ear¬ lier, Minturno esteems Petrarch as the best model for Italian verse: “Tra noi un sol Petrarca si truoui, à cui di farci simili ogni opera, 8c ogni studio por debbiamo’’ ‘Among us Petrarch alone is found to whom we ought to make ourselves similar with all our industry and all our zeal’ (Minturno, p. 445; Gilbert trans., p. 301). Unlike Bembo, whose motives for authorizing Petrarch were rooted in a political desire to unify the Italian language and in a self-serving bid to gain recognition from the Medici by exalting Florentine culture, Minturno appeals to the putatively timeless canons of rhetoric. Minturno recognizes that poetic reputation is, or can be, a construc¬ tion of critical discourse and cultural politics rather than of intrinsic worth, but he represses any impulse to explore this possibility. Assessing 53Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chi¬ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 737-43, 755~59; Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 95-97-

5§

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

the merits of Boiardo and Ariosto, he appropriates the terms of Machia¬ velli^ historical schema for literary history when he reflects upon the virtù and fortuna that make or break poetic reputations: “O la propria uertù, ò la fortuna (s’egli è pur uero, che ogni poema, si come ciascuna altra opera, hà il suo fato) ò l’una e l’altra hà data somma riputatione” ‘[to Boiardo and Ariosto] either their own virtue or fortune (if it is indeed true that every poem like every other work has its fate) or both together have given a very great reputation’ (Minturno 32; Gilbert 284). His resort to the play of linguistic structures, his flirtation with rhetorical undecidability, his willed historical amnesia prevent him from looking harder at fortuna and virtù in forming canons. Whether subdued by the Spanish vice-regency imposed upon Naples a half-century earlier, or by promptings of the Counter-Reformation, in which Minturno as bishop of Ugento played an active part at the Council of Trent, the literary theorist has retreated to rhetorical formalism. Minturno’s emphasis upon the workings of language and the struc¬ tures of thought leads to his focus upon Petrarch’s stylistic use of Tuscan and his formulation of moral sententiae: “Le quali si dirizzano all’amendare la uita, & al bene operare’’ ‘Their purpose is to make life better and encourage good works’ (Minturno 285; Gilbert 297). Authorizing Petrarch as a model for Italian verse, Minturno proclaims his own Al¬ exandrine taste for small, highly wrought forms in the lyric genre rather than for sprawling forms of narrative or epic, for precious and preco¬ cious artistry rather than for crowd-pleasing popularity: “Io per me più stimo un sonetto del Petrarca, che tutti i Romanzi; onde conuien, che’l uolgo errante agogni’’ T value a sonnet by Petrarch higher than all the romances; this indicates that the rabble is mistaken in its wishes’ (Min¬ turno 26; Gilbert 276). These preferences bolster Minturno’s denial of history or biography as sites of lyric utterance. Sonnets are poetic fabri¬ cations that depict nothing of the poet’s life or avowed intentions. Thus Minturno impugns any notion of the Rime sparse as a narrative of actual events or even as a dramatization of the author’s subjectivity. He views it instead as a collection of poems whose lyric persona is rhetorically invented and biographically discontinuous with the poet’s selfhood. The Rime sparse nonetheless embody principles of poetic imitation. To those who would claim that only narrative or drama imitate human ac¬ tion, Minturno responds that every act of speech imitates something. At the most basic level, all speakers project images that represent qualities of body and mind, habit and expression: “Percioche dir non si può non imitare colui, che ben dipinge la forma del corpo; overo gli affetti dell’animo: ò dicevolmente nota i costumi; ò qualunque altra cosa dis¬ crive talmente, che espressa la ti paia vedere’’ ‘He who competently

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

59

depicts the body’s form or the soul’s affects or aptly notes his habits or describes something else so that you seem to see what is expressed, can¬ not be said not to imitate’ (175). As lyric poets, Horace and Petrarch image forth an invented persona, “quali sono la maggior parte l’ode Horatiane, e le rime del Petrarca; ove niuno à parlare s’introduce’’ ‘as, for the greater part, are Horace’s odes or Petrarch’s Rime where no one other than the poet is introduced to speak’ (175). When poets address a specific audience, they fashion for themselves a suitable voice in order to appeal to that audience: “Anzi, quando il Poeta parla ad altrui; par, che deponga la persona del Poeta; e ne prenda, ò tenga un’altra’’ ‘More¬ over, when a poet speaks to someone else, it even appears that he dis¬ places his own persona and assumes or retains another’ (175). For Minturno the lyric utterance need not correspond to the poet’s own intentions or beliefs; it serves rather to enact a series of assertions that acquire lives of their own. In the Rime sparse Petrarch cultivates two central voices or personas as poet and lover, “percioche nel Petrarca due persone intender possiamo: Puna del Poeta, quando egli narra; e l’altra dell’amante, quando dirizza à Madonna Laura il suo dire’’ ‘since in Petrarch we can understand two personas, one of the poet when he narrates and another of the lover when he addresses Laura’ (175). These personas fluctuate in turn as private citizen, professional scholar, public figure, devoted friend, and ardent patriot. Minturno notes these varia¬ tions in sonnet 112, “Sennucio io vo’’; canzone 126, “Chiare, freschi, e dolci acque”; and canzone 128, “Italia mia”; and he implies that the Rime sparse sustain still others, all dissociable from any necessary linkage with the historical Petrarch. Gesualdo takes this argument a step further. From the start he adopts Minturno’s formal and stylistic categories and especially his definitions of genres and subgenres. Gesualdo situates Petrarch as a lyric poet in the tradition of Pindaric or Horatian ode rather than Callimachan or Tibullan elegy, and he explains his reasoning in terms of Minturno’s thesis about the poetic persona: “Benché egli nel suo cantare in guisa d’Elegia sovente si lamenti e pianga, nondimeno più simile à quel di Pindaro, e d’Horatio, ch’a quel di Callimacho e di Tibullo mi par lo stile” ‘Although in his songs he often complains and laments in the manner of an elegy, nonetheless his style seems more like that of Pindar and Horace than that of Callimachus and Tibullus’ (ciiir). Petrarch’s play of shifting voices implies that none of his texts ever fully stabilizes its author’s identity. The poet has created many different versions of him¬ self, fictive or otherwise, to serve many different needs. A synchronic rhetorical analysis of Petrarch’s style therefore yields more insight into the diversity of his creation than any diachronic analysis of its narrative.

6o

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Approaching Petrarch’s texts through their changing style, Gesualdo’s commentary uncovers figurative equivocations, tropological dissonances, and enigmatic ambiguity. Their ambivalence locates Petrarch’s style mid¬ way between the ornamental display of the ancients and the plain style of the moderns: Tenne egli nelle prose uno stile temprato e mezo tra l’antico di quelli or¬ natissimi prosatori, & il moderno de religiosi e devoti del nome di Cristo; Ne i versi il migliore che in quella età potea tenersi; ma, riguardandosi à gli antichi poeti, mezano. (biiiiv) In prose he adhered to a tempered middle style, between the ancient style of those most ornamental writers and the modern style of those devoted to the name of Christ; in verse, he produced the best that could be found in this age but, with respect to the ancients, a middle style nonetheless.

This same ambivalence blinded Petrarch’s contemporaries to his virtues. Gesualdo acknowledges that while earlier generations esteemed Dante for the vast design of his subject matter, later generations have been able to appreciate the more refined subtlety of Petrarch’s style: O perché ella non affisava bene anchora i chiari lumi de l’eloquentia, al solo soggetto, non à gli ornamenti de le sententie ne à le figure de le parole intendendo. Perciò che quello piu appregiamo, che è piu conforme à nostro costume: ne può ben laudarsi quello, che mal sì conosce. (bvr) Either because it did not yet pay good attention to the clear lights of elo¬ quence, perceiving its content alone and not its ornaments of thought or figures of speech, or because what we value more is more consonant with our own customs and what was poorly understood cannot be fully praised.

Notably for Gesualdo, Petrarch’s stylistic predilections resemble those of Plato’s Socrates, the ironist who questions his own understanding and disrupts naive links between words and things: “Conciosia che nelle sue scritture si vede apertamente haver saputo dissimulare, dimostrando sov¬ ente ignorare e coprendo maestrevolmente gli affetti suoi, 8c intendendo altro che non sonavano le parole o gli atti scoprivano” Tn his texts he seems openly to have known how to dissimulate, often showing igno¬ rance and masterfully veiling his emotions, and understanding words and deeds differently from how they sound or appear’ (bvv). Petrarch’s lifetime of wandering furnishes a metaphor for his text as a Socratic itinerary: “Hebbe egli ancho in costume d’andare pellegrinando per un suo naturale amore di veder molto, oltra che fu da fatale suo destino

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

6 1

che ritrovandosi nato in essilio, non avesse mai fermo albergo, si come habbiamo nella vita sua dimostrato” ‘With his natural desire to see much, beyond his fatal destiny to have been born in exile, he was in the habit of wandering far and wide; as we have shown in his biography, he never had a fixed lodging’ (bviiv). Its rhetorical complexity represents the human condition as a mimetically unstable, experientially decentered one. Gesualdo’s figurative approach to Petrarch’s style informs his historical approach to Laura. For the most part Gesualdo endorses Vellutello’s account of her life, but he allows his own penchant for ambiguity to equivocate its conclusions. He questions, for example, whether Laura was so impoverished as Vellutello claims, and he evokes the rumor that she was wholly fictional. Antonio da Tempo and Fausto da Longiano also evoked this rumor, but only in order to deny it categorically or to use it to support their own tendentious images of Petrarch. With Gesualdo the doubt is radical. On the one hand he asserts that Petrarch’s own Latin writings measure her existence: “Ne finto com’alcuni stimarono ma vero. Il che senza dubio veruno troverete non pur ne\V Eccloghe, ma nell' Epistole Familiari' ‘[Petrarch’s love for Laura] was not Active as others claim, but true; you will discover that without any doubt not just in the eclogues but also in his familiar letters’ (civ). On the other hand he points out that Petrarch often uses Laura to figure his literary endeavors: “Nondimeno tal volta col nome di lei par che alluda a l’ardente suo amore verso la poesia 8c allo studio che vi pose per acquistarne honore” ‘Nonetheless it occasionally appears that with her name he refers to his ardent love for poetry and scholarship that he undertakes in order to win honor’ (civ). Her figurai role does not necessarily cancel her histor¬ ical identity, but neither does it confirm whether the Rime sparse e Trionfi or any of Petrarch’s other texts represent her accurately. Gesualdo embraces this open-endedness as a solution to other prob¬ lems in reading the Rime sparse e Trionfi. He explicitly rejects Vellutello’s attempt to impose closure on the random order of the sequence: “Andar poi cercando ordine in tutte altre cose, che non si veggono esser si manifestamente congiunte, ne con si certa sequela insieme si rispon¬ dono, sarebbe opra si come di molta fatica, cosi poco a grado, per non dir perduta” ‘To go looking for order in diverse components that do not seem to be related in any apparent manner and that do not follow one another in any definite sequence would be a laborious task indeed, so unrewarding, not to say utterly hopeless’ (ciiv). For Gesualdo this ran¬ domness constitutes a real poetic merit. Vellutello betrays its full-blooded vitality by reorganizing it into a coherent narrative. Gesualdo thus argues that a collection of lyric poetry does not need the structure of an epic

62

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

or drama and that it even suffers from such an ordering: “Cosi apo noi le canzoni & i sonetti non debbono esser tutti in quella maniera continoati, che nei Triomphi, e nei Canti serviamo” ‘So for us his songs and sonnets do not have to be wholly continuous in the manner that we observe in the Trionfi and songs’ (ciiv). To support his claims, the commentator refers to Petrarch’s avowal in his letters that his Rime sparse survive more by accident than by design and that they circulate against his will. He even evokes the manifest contradic¬ tion that sonnets 118 and 122 mark the sixteenth and seventeenth anni¬ versaries of the speaker’s love before sonnet 145 marks its fifteenth anniversary, while sonnet 266 observes its eighteenth anniversary after sonnet 212 observes its twentieth. At the same time he affirms that no manuscript authorizes any other order than the one that Vat. Lat. 3195 es¬ tablishes as definitive. The sequence represents its speaker’s inner growth as something that exceeds any historical record. Gesualdo therefore con¬ siders it a moral duty to preserve the order of Vat. Lat. 3195: “Di meravig¬ liosa & inaudita presontione eterno biasmo potrei riportarne” T would bring down upon myself eternal censure for incredible and unprece¬ dented presumption’ (ciiir). The poet did not bother to arrange a se¬ quence, nor will the commentator presume to do so Far from displacing any moral imperatives, Gesualdo finds that aes¬ thetic issues accentuate them. Petrarch’s complex moral sentiment fully justifies his complexity of form. Describing the verbal style of the Rime sparse, Gesualdo finally resorts to negative definition as the only adequate way to affirm its powerful accommodation of contradictory impulses: Quanto senza durezza grave, e pieno di maestate? Quanto senza lascivia, leggiadro, piacevole e copioso? . . .Niente è in lui, che non sia di divine virtuti, di celesti bellezze, d’angelici costumi, d’honestissimo amore, di somma umanitate, d’ineffabile cortesia. (ciiiv)

How serious and full of grandeur without being insensible? How graceful, pleasing, and abundant without being lascivious? . . .There is nothing in it that does not partake of divine merit, celestial beauty, angelic habit, the purest love, the greatest humanity, ineffable courtesy.

The moral quality of Petrarch’s style, its ethical usefulness, consists in its depth of statement, a statement that goes beyond any thematic com¬ monplaces in semantic complexity, metaphoric abundance, and figurai oppositions. The third major rhetorical commentary on the Rime sparse e Trionfi in the sixteenth century is the work of Bernardino Daniello. Born at Lucca

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

63

in 1500, Daniello had distinguished himself as a student of the Venetian Trifone Gabriele in various tasks as editor, translator, teacher, poet, and commentator.54 In dedicating his Petrarchan commentary to Andrea Cornelio, bishop of Brescia, Daniello acknowledges his debt to Gabriele, “Queste sue fatiche sono in gran parte di Trifon Gabriele’’ ‘These labors owe a great deal to Trifone Gabriele,’’ even to the extent that others, “alcuni maligni’’ ‘maligners’ in his view, think his work plagiarized from Gabriele (*iiv). Since Gabriele notoriously refused to publish what he taught, Daniello eagerly casts himself as Plato to the former’s Socrates in transcribing and disseminating his work, “ch’io hora di quest’altro mio novello Socrate ho fatto e di fare intendo per l’avvenire in tutte le cose: giovandomi in questo esso Platone imitare’’ ‘which I now have done with respect to my new Socrates, and which I intend to do on all counts in the future: rejoicing that I imitate Plato in this respect’ (*iiv). Indeed, as Gabriele was Bembo’s student, and as Daniello was Gabriele’s, Daniello’s ideas might seem ultimately to derive from Bembo, whose projected line-by-line gloss on the Rime sparse failed to materialize. Daniello nonethlesss modifies the work of his predecessors as he ad¬ vances it beyond plagiarism.55 At Venice in 1536 Daniello published his own concise and illuminating La poetica volgare, based on a synthesis of Ci¬ cero’s rhetoric and Horace’s art of poetry with references to Gabriele’s precepts. Five years later in quarto with Italic type he published his first commentary on the Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi (1541), a project that he re¬ vised and expanded in 1549. In 1545 he contributed with Gesualdo and others to Domenichi’s and Giolito’s collection of Rime di diversi eccellenti autori, where his “Se

’1

viver nostro è breve oscuro giorno’’ became an ex¬

plicit model for Du Bellay’s “Si nostre vie est moins qu’une journée” in Olive. In 1549, the year of his augmented commentary on Petrarch, Dan¬ iello edited and translated Virgil’s Georgies for an edition of Virgil’s works, and late in life he compiled a remarkable set of annotations for Dante’s Commedia, published posthumously at Venice in 1568. The moral tone of Daniello’s “Vita di Petrarca’’ in his expanded com¬ mentary (1549; there is no “Vita” in the first edition of 1541) distances it from Gesualdo’s formalism. Daniello represents the poet’s aversion to court life with a confessional pathos that condemns court intrigue: “Ma chiaritosi poi de’ costumi e proceder de la corte, veggendo che non i dotti e vertuosi, ma gl’ignoranti & vitiosi vi si amavano, favorivano e 54Hollander ed., pp. vii-viii. 55See Parker, Commentary and Ideology, pp. 109— 23. For Daniello’s classical models see Weinberg, Literary Criticism, pp. 721-24. For Daniello’s linguistic focus see Ezio Raimondi, “Bernardino Daniello e le varianti petrarcheschi,” Studi petrarcheschi 5 (1952): 95-130, pp. 116—27, an daughter of Ercole II d’Este and Renée of France. Lucrezia’s quiet life belied her parents’ tempestuous marriage and divergent genealogies.60 Her paternal grandparents were Alfonso I d’Este (d. 1534) and Lucrezia Borgia (d. 1519), whom her name honors; her maternal grandparents were King Louis XII of France (d. 1515) and Anne of Brittany. Lucrezia’s father ruled as duke of Fer¬ rara from 1534 to 1559; against his wishes, her mother made the duchy a haven for Reformers from Italy and northern Europe. Both Clément Marot and Jean Calvin found refuge there, the former after the affaire des placards (18 October 1534) from April 1535 to June 1536, the latter in spring 1536, disguised as “Carlo d’Esperville.’’ Late in life Lucrezia was married to Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino, where she retreated to obscurity. Brucioli addressed her when she was only thirteen years old, an unremarkable girl who hardly deserved his gushing encomium: In modo che, ciò che di bello, di leggiadro, di alto intendimento, et lodati costumi ha descritto il Petrarca in Madonna Laura in vostra signoria illus¬ trissima si vedrà veramente ritornato in vita alla età nostra, piu bello et piu mirabile, che mai fusse, aggiuntovi (quello che non hebbe ella, nata in humile e basso loco) che vostra eccellenti, tiene la sua origine alta e Signorile, dagli altissimi Herculi, di lungo tempo dominanti a buona parte della Italia et della reale casa di Francia, e da quel Re, che su de piu nomati, e de piu invitti, che mai habbia havuta la christianita. (Aiv) In such a way that whatever beauty, charm, high intelligence, and praise¬ worthy manners Petrarch has attributed to Laura, will seem wholly revived for us in you, more beautiful and marvelous than woman ever was, since your excellence, which she did not have because of her humble birth and low rank, derives its high and noble origins from Ercole, who has ruled over

'’"See Luciano Chiappini, Gli Estensi (Varese: Oglio, 1967), pp. 248-64.

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

74

a good part of Italy for a long time, and the royal house of France, and directly from that king who ruled over the undefeated, chosen people of Christendom.

Lucrezia descends from “Ercole” in two senses: first, as the daughter of Ercole II d’Este, then as the granddaughter of French royalty that claims as its mythic progenitor Hercules, the parent of Galathes after whom Gaul is named. Brucioli’s tribute to France may help to explain why the expatriate publisher Rovillio chose his edition of the Rime sparse for re¬ printing at Lyon in 1550. On the one hand Brucioli s praise exhorts young Lucrezia to fulfil the promise of her distinguished lineage in years to come. Not only could Petrarch’s Laura serve as her model, but Lu¬ crezia herself might serve as a model for others. On the other hand Brucioli’s praise suggests that Lucrezia is already fulfilling her promise. It occurs in the mature figure of her mother, Rende. Not only does Petrarch’s Laura adumbrate her virtue, but Rende herself embodies the supreme virtues that Petrarch had invested in his beloved. Rende fur¬ nishes a living template for Brucioli’s interpretation of Laura. Renee also furnishes a living template for the Reform movement in Italy.61 As a daughter of the French king, she was tutored along with her celebrated cousin, the sister of Francois I, later Marguerite de Navarre, by the evangelical humanist Lefevre d Etaples. Upon hei marriage to Ercole d’Este in 1528, she flaunted her royal French origins when she opposed Ferrara’s alliance with the papacy and the Spanish monarch, France’s archenemy. Though she herself never broke with Rome, she extended lavish hospitality to Calvin and exiled French Calvinists. Her husband, the son of Lucrezia Borgia and hence a pontiffs grandson, objected repeatedly to Rende s support of the Protestant cause. Aftei she offered assistance to the Studium of Modena in 1545, openly in sym¬ pathy with Luther’s teaching, Ercole disbanded the group on charges of heresy. When Brucioli prepared his edition of Petrarch three years later, Renee’s devotion to reform still held firm. Though Brucioli encouraged her resolve, he lived to see it falter. The duke, scandalized by his wife s eating of meat on Good Friday, 1554’ by her refusal to take com¬ munion the following Easter Sunday, invited the Inquisition to Ferrara. Facing censure, Renee renounced heresy and pledged allegiance to Rome. In Ferrara as elsewhere in Italy, the Protestant movement gave way to Rome’s Counter-Reformation. The Reformation sentiment of Brucioli’s commentary emerges undis¬ guised in its annotations on Petrarch’s sonnets 136-38. Whereas other

61 Chiappini,

Gli Estensi, passim; de Mattei, Il pensiero, passim.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

75

sixteenth-century commentators approach these poems with caution, an¬ notating them lightly for their historical references to the Babylonian captivity, Revelations 17, and Constantine’s conversion, Brucioli takes the opportunity to endorse reform. The poems refer explicitly to Pe¬ trarch’s desire to reestablish the papacy at Rome, but Brucioli directs his criticism against the institution itself and assails its present-day incarna¬ tion at Rome as much as Petrarch’s at Avignon: Appare che i tre precedenti sonetti fussino fatti dal Poeta in abominatione della Romana chiesa, dispiacendogli sopra modo i sozzi e scelerati suoi cos¬ tumi e in somma la biasima e danna tanto vehementemente e con tante obrobriose parole, che io non saprei che piu mi ci aggiugnere. (ccxr)

It seems that the three preceding sonnets were fashioned by the poet in abomination of the Roman Church, its foul and wicked customs displeasing him above all, and in sum he reproves and condemns it so forcefully and with such derogatory words, that I would not know how to add more to it.

Pleading shame at repeating Petrarch’s words, Brucioli exploits the op¬ portunity to affirm his criticism in words that are not his own: “Ne credo che si potessi pure imaginare corte piu scelerata, non che chiesa di Christo, quanto descrive qui la chiesa di Roma, le parole delquale non ardisco, non che altro, replicare, tanto mi piano obrobriose” ‘Nor do I believe that a more shameful court can even be imagined than the Church of Jesus Christ, in so far as he here describes the Church of Rome, in words that I nor anyone dare repeat, so derogatory do they seem to me’ (cxxr). Brucioli brings his criticism of these sonnets to bear upon the rest of the Rime sparse. Like Fausto he emphasizes courtly manners and Pe¬ trarch’s courtly style as a setting for the poet’s moral action, and like Fausto he weighs Petrarch’s judgment against quotations from Scripture that apply to particular situations. Scriptural quotation provides a major intertext, displacing earlier commentators’ cross-references to classical literature and philosophy without quite dominating the interpreter’s moral horizon. The technique encourages readers to draw their own conclusions. Brucioli’s commentary is sometimes uneven, terse beyond clear formulation, and evasive in its rhetoric, but when it hits its mark, it makes an important statement about Christian faith and individual conscience, the relative merits of internal and external authority, and the possibility of using Scripture as a literary model. The last major sixteenth-century commentary on the Rime sparse e Trionfi was Ludovico Castelvetro’s Le rime del Petrarca. Published post-

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

76

humously at Basel in 1582 in quarto with the poetry in Italic and the commentary in a variety of Roman types, it appeared in only one edition and seems not to have had wide circulation.62 Certainly the same author’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, published in 1576’ far eclipsed it in fame and influence. The Sposizione, retrieved from the commentator’s papers, assembled by his nephew and literary executor, Giacomo Maria Castelvetro, and dedicated to Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara, is unpolished. It consists of notes on isolated lines and single words, mainly lexical in nature. They contribute toward new interpretations of the poetry, but, despite their author’s reputation for taking bold and unconventional positions, their statements about the meaning or significance of individ¬ ual poems tend to be conservative. Castelvetro evidently planned a longer, more detailed commentary than this one. Notes on the first three sonnets add up to twenty pages; those on ensuing poems average one page apiece. Like Daniello, Castelvetro appeals to the authority of clas¬ sical philology and he projects the ethos of a careful scholar. He presents detailed factual evidence, interprets it rigorously, and reaches many con¬ clusions that do not echo or repeat the work of predecessors. When the novelty of Castelvetro’s insight matches the originality of his literary sen¬ sibility, the Sposizione offers a splendid example of late humanist criti¬ cism. Castelvetro was born at Modena in 1507 and he died in exile at Chiavenna in 1571. He passed his early years as a reader of law at the Studium of Modena where his sympathies with the Protestant Reform ran warm. In 1542 he signed a “Formulario di Fede’’ that dissociated him from the activities of radical thinkers. After Ercole II d Este disbanded the Studium in 1545, Castelvetro devoted his attention to literary pursuits. In the 1550s he engaged in a celebrated polemic with Annibale Caro. It began when Castelvetro censured Caro’s poetry for not conforming to Petrarch’s language, and it ended when his opponent accused him of heresy. Summoned to the Inquisition at Rome in 1560 for allegedly translating the work of a heretic, Mrlanchthon s Loci communes, he fled into exile. He left behind in various stages of completion a study of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (published 1563), an appendix to Bembo s Prose della volgar lingua (published 1563), a commentary on cantos 1 to 19 °f Dante’s Inferno (published 1572), and the commentary on Petrarch’s Rime. He passed the last decade of his life at Basel, Lyon, Geneva, and Vienna, where a few months before he died he dedicated to Emperoi Maximilian his commentary on Aristotle s Poetics.

6-Baldacci,

Il Petrarchismo, pp. 165—79»

Palumbo, 1963), pp. 1-22.

Bortolo Tommaso Sozzi, Peti aita (Palermo.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

77

The commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics vibrates with Castelvetro’s chal¬ lenges against the literary orthodoxies of his day.63 These challenges sit¬ uate his earlier views of Petrarch in a clearer light. While conventional theory acknowledges pleasure and profit as the twin goals of poetry, Castelvetro asserts that its goal is pleasure alone. Poetry should address audiences of all persuasions and of every degree of learning and sophis¬ tication. As Aristotle’s history of drama shows, poetry originated with “the common people’’ (Bongiorno trans., p. 19). Despite these origins, however,

the ignorant came to believe that the first poets were imbued

with the divine spirit and enjoyed God’s unfailing help” (37). Poets are experts in poetic language and from earlier poetic models they develop their expertise consciously, objectively, and without reference to their own feelings: “The poet does not find the appropriate model of the emotion he seeks in what he is able to observe within himself or to learn from his past experience” (39). Petrarch emerges as a superior poet because he has mastered difficult verbal skills apart from any need to teach or to represent his own experience. Technical competence, however, poses a problem. Petrarch in his Familiares 1.7 refers to two kinds of poets, those who “take no notice of other poets, but invent their own matter and their own modes of figu¬ rative speech, while the rest cannot turn their backs on matter previously invented by others or on the figures of speech already used by them” (41). Petrarch identifies himself with the second kind, imitative poets who refine earlier conventions and techniques, but Castelvetro dispar¬ ages their practice: “I am of the opinion that poets of this latter kind must never for a moment be tolerated” (41). These poets acquire their art “mechanically” as “a piece of stolen property” (42) and do not deserve serious attention. Castelvetro defines as a worthier sort of imi¬ tation one that is “in every way distinguishable from any made before that day and, so to speak, creates a model for others to copy” (43). This sort, he concludes, “is and should and may be called a contest between the poet and the dispositions of fortune or the course of human events to determine which will invent the complex of human actions that in the hearing will be judged to be the more marvelous and the more abundant source of pleasure” (43). The word “contest” is important. At his best Petrarch engages in a contest with the literary tradition that precedes him, and his weapon is language. Castelvetro’s commentary subsequently focuses upon Petrarch’s language and the particular mo-

l,:,See Weinberg, Literary Criticism, pp. 502-11, and the excellent introduction of Andrew Bongiorno to his translation of Castelvetro, On the Art of Poetry (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), pp. xiii-xlvii.

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

78

ment in history when it became a model for creative borrowing from ancient literature. Castelvetro wrote most of his commentary on Petrarch before his exile in

1560, and probably did so by recording his observations over a long

period of time.64 Internal references to his Benedetto Varchi’s edition of the latter’s

Giunte sopra Bembo,

Prose

liest possible date for many of his notes. The

based on

in 1549, indicate the ear¬

Giunte sopra Bembo

provides

an important source for Castelvetro’s views about language. Castelvetro tempers Bembo’s purism, however, first by valorizing Dante’s example as well as Petrarch’s for certain popular expressions, and more generally by asserting the constant state of flux that besets language. Just as poets should avoid using foreign expressions, so they should avoid an exclusive devotion to the language of the past. The

Rime sparse

provide excellent

models for contemporary poetry, but only by encouraging all poets to surpass Petrarch creatively. When he comments upon the poetry, Castelvetro shows how this prin¬ ciple works by juxtaposing Petrarch with his chief precursor, Dante, and with his modern emulators, especially Ariosto. His notes teem with ref¬ erences to Dante’s oeuvre, but particularly to the cantos of Paolo and Francesca, Pier della Vigna, Brunetto Latini, and Ugolino in the and the terrace of the poets in the

Purgatorio.

to

on

determine

Dante’s

influence

known disclaimers about studying the

Inferno

Sometimes Castelvetro tries

Petrarch,

Comedy.

despite

Petrarch s

well-

Certainly in his references

to Ariosto and the moderns, Castelvetro acknowledges the contamina¬ tion of Dantesque and Petrarchan sources. In Dante’s Ghibelline criti¬ cism of the papacy, Castelvetro sees forerunners of Petrarch’s own views, and he uses their combined force to indict present-day clerical abuses. Underlying Castelvetro’s philological erudition, finally,

is a genuine

openness to new ideas and new ways of thinking about language. As the printer Sedabonis explains in his own preface, the

Sposizione

hardly rep¬

resents a final judgment on Petrarch because Castelvetro s thoughts on language and style were constantly evolving: “Non picciola differenza si vede essere tra le cose, che egli scrisse nella sua giovinezza e quelle, che andò poi scrivendo di tempo in tempo divenendo vecchio

A rather

considerable difference seems to exist between the writings that he pro¬ duced in his youth and those that he later wrote as he grew old

(i1)-

The commentary records that evolution on every page. It explores the workings of Petrarch’s language as a self-sufficient medium of exchange

^See Ezio Raimondi, “Gli scrupoli di un filologo: Ludovico Castelvetro e il Petrarca,” Studi petrarcheschi 5 (1952): 131—210, pp. i33—3^> see a^so Jtaimoncd s remarks on Castel¬

vetro’s Reform-minded attention to Scripture, pp. 179-202.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

79

that reflects history without being inextricably bound to it, a medium whose life in the context of other literary discourses takes on new mean¬ ing with each turn of phrase that can be compared to those of other authors. Castelvetro’s Protestant contribution is to emphasize Saint Augustine

and

other

church

fathers,

but

the writings of

especially

passages

of

Scripture—notably Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the New Testament—as models for the

Rime sparse.

Castelvetro is every bit as ca¬

pable a classical scholar as Gesualdo and Daniello, but more than they he knows the Bible and understands how it penetrates Petrarch’s literary art. This understanding generates at least a few new readings of individ¬ ual poems. Though Castelvetro’s work consists mostly of detailed lexical notes and quotations from source materials, it summarizes interpretive consequences in headnotes to each poem. There, in a concise discursive style,

Castelvetro

takes issue with

previous readings,

suggests different

modes of approach, and reinforces the possibility of a Protestant-style hermeneutics conformable with the Word of God. For example, Castel¬ vetro’s

headnote

cittadine heaven,’

del

to

cielo’’

sonnet ‘The

346,

elect

“Li

angeli

angels

compares God’s kingdom in

and

electi

et l’anime

blessed

heaven with

souls,

beate

citizens

/ of

God’s kingdom on

earth, and, after alluding to Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews

11:40, refers

to the doctrine of election and “Diterminatione del P.” ‘Petrarch’s de¬ termination’ as a member of God’s chosen sainthood (133*). Castelvetro’s commentary was published too late to make a strong im¬ pact upon the generation of Bembo and his Italian followers, or upon members of the French Plèiade who paid serious attention to Gallican reform, but its sentiments would have found timely agreement with the Protestant sympathies of England’s Elizabethan 1580s and early

sonneteers in

the

late

1590s. If Castelvetro’s focus upon lexical peculiarities

were largely irrelevant to a non-Italian audience, the reach of some of his bolder conclusions about Scriptural meaning and doctrinal associa¬ tions could

attract wider attention.

On

the whole,

it is as difficult to

classify Castelvetro as any other early modern commentator in a single, inflexible mold. None of the commentators is exclusively “Protestant’’ or “rhetorical’’

or “monarchist’’

or “republican.’’ To think otherwise

would be to impose an ideological consistency or a modern—and hence anachronistic—awareness entertained.

As

each

of subsequent history

commentator

responds

to

that no

commentator

Petrarch’s

text,

each

shifts gears, offering now a moral observation, now a stylistic note, now a political comment. The dominant concerns transgress categorical boundaries. One might thus recognize Castelvetro’s interests to be as philological as those of

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

8o

Gesualdo and Daniello, or the interests of Fausto da Longiano and An¬ tonio Brucioli to be as courtly as those of Sylvano da Venafro. From the latter perspective one might also redefine the political interests of Filelfo and Squarzafico, just as from the philological perspective one might re¬ define the rhetorical interests of Antonio da Tempo and Vellutello. The result can only illuminate the expanding and unstable community of different interests that these commentators fashioned, disputed, and re¬ defined for more than a century after the first printed edition of the Rime sparse. Nor were the foregoing commentaries the only ones produced or appended to printed editions of Petrarch. Throughout the sixteenth century an amazing variety of notes, glosses, and interpretive aids accom¬ panied almost an equal number of other editions of the Rime sparse. Beginning in 1533 the Aldine press printed its Petrarca with twenty-eight pages of explanatory notes that Paulus Manutius attributed to his father Aldus. Ranging widely from lexical details and historical identifications to general attributions of sources and analogues, these notes were re¬ printed in eight later editions at the Aldine press and, outside of Italy, in three editions (1545, 1547, 1550) at the press of Jean de Tournes in Lyon.65 In 1539 Francesco Alunno da Ferrara augmented his edition of the Rime sparse (Venice: Francesco Mariolini da Forlì) with a useful ri¬ mario and concordance that he expanded threefold in 1550. In 1546 Francesco Sansovino lightly annotated the first twenty-six poems of the Rime sparse, then plagiarized the Aldine notes for the rest of his text (Venice: Pietro Ravano). Between 1547 and 1560 Lodovico Dolce pub¬ lished fourteen editions of the Rime sparse (Venice: Gabriel Giolito) that introduced many lexical emendations with explanatory notes. In 1549 Apollonio Campano offered five pages of random annotations as a pref¬ ace to his edition (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi). Five years later Lodovico Dolce enlisted ninety-two pages of explanatory notes by Giulio Camillo to accompany Vellutello’s lives of Petrarch and Laura as enrichments for his text (Venice: Giolito, 1554, 1557, 1559* and In *554 Giro¬ lamo Ruscelli, a popular editor of Dante and Ariosto, printed his text in Vellutello’s rearranged order with Vellutello’s lives of the protagonists, and to it he appended a concordance of 285 pages (Venice: Paolo Pietrasanta). Finally at Lyon in 1558 Guglielmo Rovillio abstracted from the Prose della volgar lingua each of Bembo’s statements about Petrarch’s text and he reattached them to the relevant poems for his II Petrarca con 65See Fowler, Cornell University Catalogue, pp. 99—110 and passim for detailed bibliogra¬ phy.

AUTHORIZING COMMENTARIES

81

dichiarazioni non più stampate (reprinted in 1564; published at Venice by Bevilacqua in 1562, 1564, 1565, 1568, 1570, and 1573). These last mentioned commentaries surely reached a wide readership, and undoubtedly their choice of interpretive materials favored particular views of Petrarch and his achievement. Because their annotations are highly selective and largely unsystematic, however, they authorize no ide¬ ological constructions of Petrarch comparable to those of the commen¬ tators whom I have designated as major. They elucidate some textual problems, paraphrase or metaphrase specific poems, and display an in¬ ventory of Petrarch’s customary diction and stylistic turns of phrase, but they refrain from projecting alternative or competitive versions of Pe¬ trarch the way the major commentators do. The latter offer controversial interpretations of the text that revise readers’ habits of approaching the Rime sparse. Antonio, Filelfo, and Squarzafico try to reclaim Petrarch for Northern Italian absolutism; Vellutello for amatory narrative; Sylvano, Gesualdo, and Daniello for rhetorical innovation; and Fausto, Brucioli, and Castelvetro for reformist enthusiasm. In the process they canonize Petrarch not only for their local, regional, or national causes, but also for European literature.

CHAPTER

THREE

Authorizing Petrarch in Italy

Authorizing Petrarch’s Language: Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua

P

)ietro Bembo (1470-1547) could deem himself a citizen of all Italy.

As son of the patrician Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo, he spent part of his youth in the embassies of Florence (i475—7^ 148183), Rome (1487-88), and Bergamo (1489-90).1 As a young adult he studied Greek with Constantine Lascaris at Messina (1492-94). In 149799 and 1502-3 he lived at the court of Alfonso d’Este in Ferrara, where he pursued a celebrated love affair with Lucrezia Borgia, and in 1506— 12 he lived at the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro in Urbino, where he participated in the discussions recorded in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. From 1513 to 1519 he served as secretary to the Medici Pope Leo X in Rome, moving afterward to scholarly retirement at Padua. When opportunity promised him advancement in the Church, he took holy orders in 1522, but he relinquished neither his connubial relation¬ ship with a young woman, Morosina, who bore him three children at their home in Padua, nor the occasion to serve as official historian of Venice after 1530. He spent the last years of his life as a bishop in Gubbio (1543-44) and as a cardinal in Rome (1544-47). His major literary work includes an Italian dialogue on love, Gli Asolarli (1505),

'Data from Vittorio Cian, Un decennio della vita di Pietro Bembo (1521—1531) (Turin: Er¬ manno Loescher, 1885); Mario Santoro, Pietro Bembo (Naples: Morano, 82

1937)’

PP- 11—7°-

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH IN ITALY

83

dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia; a number of Latin letters and dialogues on humanist themes, notably the DeImitatione (1512), argued in polemic with Giovan Francesco Pico; several volumes of narrative history about Venice ( 1530 ff) ; a dialogue on usages of the vernacular, Prose della volgar lingua, dedicated to the Medici Pope Clement VII (published 1525, t538, 1549); and a collection of Petrarchan Rime printed in 1530 and augmented in 1535 and 1548. While Bembo’s Rime offer a series of overt Petrarchan imitations, sometimes inspired, sometimes moribund, his Prose della volgar lingua presents a vigorous defence of old Tuscan, and specifically the composite Tuscan inscribed in Petrarch’s style, as normative for developing the Italian poetic vernacular. That this language is associated with the tre¬ cento literary heritage of Florence, and especially that heritage endorsed by Lorenzo de’ Medici and his humanist circle, is no accident. Nor is it any accident that Bembo sought to revoke features of contemporary Flor¬ entine usage associated with spoken and written forms of the constitu¬ tional republic from which the Medici were expelled (1494-1512). Though surely Bembo admitted some current Florentine usage—his own Gli Asolani, composed at Ferrara in 1497-98 and 1502-03, incorporates select popular innovations—his dominant models are the poetry of Pe¬ trarch and the prose of Boccaccio, models substantially applied in his revision of Gli Asolani published in 1530.2 Bembo composed most of the Prose in 1511 when Florence was hold¬ ing to its alliance with France against Julius II’s Holy League with Spain and Venice. While the combined strength of the papal and Spanish ar¬ mies abroad and increasing polarization at home put Soderini’s republic at a disadvantage, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici’s partnership with the pope and growing support among upperclass families in Florence in¬ creased the chances for a Medici restoration. That restoration, along with Giovanni’s election as Pope Leo X, would occur in 1512-13. Bembo had no absolute financial need to press the Medici for their patronage, but he did have a great deal of political prestige to gain from promoting their interests. As a close friend of Giuliano de’ Medici, whose exile at the court of Urbino coincided with his own residence there, and as an aspirant to high office under Leo X and Clement VII, whom he served in blatant self-interest, Bembo ratified the canon of Florentine literature advanced by the Laurentian humanists of the previous century. If his 2For a stronger emphasis on Bembo’s evolved thinking, see Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., “// pane del grano e la saggina: Pietro Bembo’s 1505 Asolani Revisited,” The Italianist 12 (1992): 5-23. Notably Bembo composed Gli Asolani at the time of Savonarola’s downfall and Sod¬ erini’s rise, events auguring new turns in the life of Florence. He revised it during the second Medici exile and published it upon the second Medici restoration.

84

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

chief goal was to authorize Petrarch as a Florentine poet, his chief ac¬ complishment was to authorize Petrarch’s vernacular as the poetic stan¬ dard for all Italy. He succeeded beyond all measure. Bembo’s father, Bernardo Bembo, had associated with Cristoforo Lan¬ dino, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and other humanists during his ambassadorship at Lorenzo’s Signoria, and his learning was justly cele¬ brated by them. It made very little difference that Pietro had spent only part of his adolescence in Florence. Petrarch himself had spent barely ten days there in 1350 and he constructed his Italian poetry in a wholly artificial language that differed greatly from sixteenth-century Florentine usage. Petrarch’s texts abound in Latinisms {condutto, fenestra), selfconscious archaisms {belli, dever), poetic reminiscences from Sicilian po¬ ets and the Stilnovisti {beltade, disio, fora), intrusive Provengalisms {augello, savere), and distinctive Tuscanisms, themselves no longer current, that had never been accepted in Florence {fera, tesoro) .3 Despite its refractory elements, the language of the Rime sparse could nonetheless embody for sixteenth-century Italy the ideals of an earlier age conducive to political harmony. To renew these ideals under the Medici banner, to suggest that the destiny of old Florence bespeaks that of modern Italy, and to encourage widespread acceptance of a Florentine patrimony through a Medicean restoration are charges that Bembo entrusts to himself. His task is to retail Petrarch’s language as an inescapable product of Flor¬ entine genius. Pietro Bembo embarked upon this project in 1501 after his brother Carlo offered Aldus Manutius a generous subvention to publish the ver¬ nacular texts of Dante and Petrarch at his press in Venice.4 Manutius accepted, eager to recruit an affluent and influential clientele, ever watchful for a good commercial deal, and possessed of an idealism that prompted him to speculate in safe markets such as vernacular poetry for income to finance less popular projects such as the Greek classics. Nor was Aldus above returning favors for help that he needed. In 1495 Pietro Bembo provided him with manuscripts of Lascaris’s Greek grammar that he published with great success. Later that year he published Bembo’s minor essay De Aetna, perhaps as a token of personal thanks. Four years after his edition of Petrarch, he likewise published Bembo’s dialogue Gli Asolani, roundly decried by some contemporaries as unthinkable trash. Aldus advertised his edition of Petrarch’s Cose volgari as a serious and ^Examples from Bruno Migliorini, The Italian Language, trans. T. Gwynfor Griffith (Lon¬ don: Faber & Faber, 1966), pp. 134-39. 4Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 109, 116, 147-50, 175, 223; and Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra quattro e cin¬ quecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 1-14, 123-30.

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH IN ITALY

85

important project. Aimed at a broad readership, it was his inaugural volume in the vernacular. To supervise its editing, he turned to Carlo’s brother, Pietro, an avid collector of autograph manuscripts and the in¬ heritor of his father’s fourth-century Terence, ninth-century Virgil, and twelfth-century Pindar books. For their copy text, both Manutius and Bembo claimed to use Petrarch’s final exemplar, begun by his secretary in 1366 and completed in the poet’s own hand the year of his death. Now in the Vatican Library (Vat. Lat. 3195), this manuscript belonged at the time to a Paduan nobleman, although Bembo indeed purchased it in 1544.5 As an editor he perhaps consulted it in 1501, at least cursorily enough to warrant the publisher’s boast, but he probably used his fath¬ er’s copy, now also in the Vatican Library (Vat. Lat. 3197), a transcrip¬ tion with some 160 variants from the original. Despite some attempts to regularize Petrarch’s orthography, Bembo’s Aldine edition offered its contemporaries a more reliable text of the Rime sparse and Trionfi than any available since Petrarch’s death, a text largely free from the contam¬ inations of an unruly transmission. Like the Greek and Latin volumes in Aldus’s series, it appeared in octavo format as a naked text free from any marginal gloss or accompanying commentary. It was the first ver¬ nacular text printed in the Italic type that Aldus had commissioned and used earlier that year for his edition of Virgil. Aldus printed the volume with an afterword that defends Bembo’s selection of the text and his care in presenting it. There Aldus notes that readers might find some lexical choices strange, beginning on the title page (Le cose volgari di messer Francesco Petrarcha . . . Sonetti et canzoni) with volgari and canzoni rather than vulgari and canzone, and continuing throughout the text with such variants as senonse rather than senon in canzone 22 and bavarico rather than barbarico in canzone 128. Aldus assures his readers that these forms derive not just from Petrarch’s hand¬ writing but from a pristine Tuscan archetype that modern usage has corrupted. Aldus refers to the story of Odysseus’s homecoming to dem¬ onstrate that what seems new and strange can be ancient and authori¬ tative. He compares Petrarch’s original text to Ulysses who “vecchio a casa ritornando non fue racconociuto da persona’’ ‘returning home as an old man, was recognized by no one’ (Biiv). The poet’s archaisms encapsulate a journey through history that has scattered and fragmented the language of the past, reducing it to an aesthetic artifice apt to be fetishized for its decorative appeal rather than understood for its signi¬ fying potential. 5Gino Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo: Studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale (Padua: Antenore, 1992), pp. 72-73 and 109-18; Giovanni Pillinini, “Traguardi linguistici nel Petrarca Bembino del 1501,“ Studi difiloglogia italiana 34 (1981): 57-76.

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

86

In Aldus’s view, Petrarch himself followed the practice of older writers “che nelle loro scritture alcuno antico vocabolo vanno alle volte spar¬ gendo tra gli usati; che poi risplendono, quasi vaghe stelle nell’ampio cielo” ‘who in their texts occasionally scatter some ancient diction among current forms, so that they might shine like brilliant stars in the vast heavens’ (Biiv). These archaisms force an encounter with history that challenges instead of confirms our understanding of the past and our expectations for the present. If an authentic autograph copy of Virgil should one day turn up, it might differ from the text that we now take for granted, but it would indubitably deepen our knowledge about an¬ tiquity: Ma quando essi a me un Virgilio recheranno inanzi; che di man di Virgilio sia, o pure da quello tolto; quante volte o parola, o sentimento mi verrà in esso veduto altrimenti stare, che non ista nel mio; tante m’ingegnero piu tosto d’intenderlo, che di colparo. (Biiir)

If scholars uncovered for me a copy of Virgil that was written in his own hand or even just copied from it, whenever its words or ideas seemed dif¬ ferent from those in our current edition, I would sooner take great care to understand the difference rather than to censure it.

To possess and now to publish an authentic autograph copy of Petrarch is doubly rewarding because it deepens our understanding not only of a proximate cultural heritage but also of our role as its inheritors. Published nearly a quarter of a century after the Aldine Petrarch, Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua offers a painstaking commentary upon this argument. It dramatizes a humanist’s anxieties about linguistic frag¬ mentation and about the possibility of reconstituting a lost language; it records the anguish of an entire generation about Italy’s political frag¬ mentation and the possibility of renewing or inventing a shared culture; and it advocates a paradoxical program that endorses literary dismember¬ ment as a way to recuperate an authentic understanding of cultural dis¬ course. In a society beset by factional strife and political dissention, Bembo’s interlocutors divide their master texts in order to open up their powers and scatter them abroad. Circulating them among various constit¬ uents, they would heal the wounds of every prior disruption. Civic and academic humanists of an earlier generation understood the Latin language and its literary culture as a common tongue for troubled Europe, a single system of signs able to consolidate rulers and nations, philosophers, theologians, and politicians. The spurious nature of this harmony became evident with the French and Spanish invasions of Italy

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH IN ITALY

87

at the turn of the century. The invasions prompted a turn inward, and cultivating the vernacular became a measure of patriotic defence. At the very least a unified vernacular might facilitate political unity.6 At the end of The Prince (1513) Machiavelli urges a restored Medici party, strength¬ ened by the papacy of Leo X, to confederate Italy and, in a catachresis that fuses the theology of redemption with the economics of power, to redeem it from servitude to the rising nation states of Europe: “Nor has [Italy] at present any hope of finding this redemption [questa redenzione\ save only in your illustrious house, which has been so highly exalted both by fortune and by its own merits [fortuna e virtù] and which has been favored by God and the Church, of which it is now ruler’ ’ (Bergin trans., p. 76). No less a pragmatic humanist than Machiavelli, Bembo urges the fashioning of a Florentine culture by consensus as a vehicle for Italy’s redemption. Supported and encouraged by his Medici patrons, he would try to squeeze out of a two-hundred-year-old Siculo-Tuscan literary idiom the seeds of a factitious cultural and linguistic heritage. Recourse to the “pure” language of a shared past, a wholly artificial language but, for that reason, one untouched by history and the contaminating influences of regional rivalry, coalitional dispute, or foreign invasion, is Bembo’s political remedy. Chaos surrounds the dialogue. Its fictional date is 10-12 December 1502, the year following the publication of the Aldine Petrarch. Evidence suggests that Bembo may have drafted some parts of his argument at this time, but that he composed most of it toward the end of his resi¬ dence at Urbino.7 In April 1512 Bembo circulated among his Venetian friends two of its eventual three books. Its plan called for an entire book on the principles of Tuscan grammar and syntax, but Giovanni Fran¬ cesco Fortunio preempted this need in 1516 by publishing the first ma¬ jor handbook of Italian grammar, Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua. Afterwards Bembo took great pains to affect the Prose s composition at an earlier date. Its fictional setting temporalizes the year of Piero Soderini’s greatest anti-Medicean political success in Florence, when he was elected gonfaloniere for life (May 1502). It temporalizes, too, the last frenzied months of Pope Alexander Vi’s pontificate (1492-1503), eight years after the first French invasion of the peninsula (1494), three years after the French appropriation of Milan (1499), and one year after the French seizure of Naples (1501). Ahead were the Spanish takeover of Naples (1503), the belligerent maneuvers of Cesare Borgia (1503) and of Pope Julius II (1503-13) in Romagna and the north, the action of

6Cesare Segre, Lingua stile e società (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), pp. 355-82. 7Cian, Un decennio, pp. 46-57.

88

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

the Holy Leagues of 1511 and 1521 against France, the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in Germany (1519), and the steady advance of the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman II through the Balkans (1520). The completed Prose, dedicated to Pope Clement VII in Novem¬ ber 1524 and published at Venice in September 1525, reverberates with echoes of these public events. Like Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, also composed in these troubled times (1507-16, 1521-24), and whose publication Bembo would super¬ vise with editorial adjustments in 1528, the Prose reflects its author’s per¬ sonal losses.8 By the time it appeared in print,

three of its four

interlocutors had died. Foremost is Carlo Bembo, the author’s brother, himself a talented scholar and the Proses major spokesperson for Pietro’s ideas. Carlo died in December, 1503, little more than a year after the fictive date of the dialogue. Another is Ercole Strozzi (1473-1508), the noted Ferrarese humanist and statesman, author in Latin of several long poems and two books of elegies and epigrams, brutally murdered in a street fight little more than five years after the fictive date of the dia¬ logue. A third is Giuliano de’ Medici (1478-1516), the author’s friend at Urbino who took refuge there during his family’s exile from Florence (1494-1512). As a surviving heir of Lorenzo de’ Medici (his elder brother Piero had died a few months earlier) and the brother of Car¬ dinal Giovanni de’ Medici, Giuliano became head of affairs in his native city after the latter’s election as Pope Leo X in March 1513, but failing health and a disinclination toward politics weakened his rule appreciably before his death in 1516. The fourth interlocutor is Federigo Fregoso (1480-1541), the only participant in the dialogue who survived its pub¬ lication. Federigo, one of the most active and adventurous of Bembo’s friends, took holy orders in 1507 and became bishop of Gubbio, to be succeeded in that office by Bembo himself. His ecclesiastical career not¬ withstanding, he distinguished himself as a military commander of his native Genoa from 1513 to 1522 when his brother Ottaviano served as Doge of that city. Federigo Fregoso, Giuliano de’ Medici, and Pietro Bembo themselves play important roles in Castiglione’s Book of the Court¬ ier, the first proposing its topic of “forming in words a perfect courtier’’ (1.12: Meier ed., p. 100; Singleton trans., p. 25), the second endorsing the monarchical directives of Francois I (1.42) and Isabella of Castile (3.35), and the third presenting a celebrated discourse on Platonic love (4.50-70). In the Prose Federigo and Giuliano provide central supports for Carlo’s arguments about fourteenth-century Tuscan language. KWayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 183-84; Piero Floriani, Bembo e Castiglione: Studi sul classicismo del cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976), pp. 104-5.

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH IN ITALY

89

Bembo situates the discussion in his native Venice on three cold, windy days in early December. The prologues to each of the Prose s three books narrate how the interlocutors gather before a fireplace in Carlo’s apart¬ ment. Their common exposure to the north wind functions as a quiet emblem of the social, political, and economic infirmities that harrow all Italy. At first their anxieties focus upon a linguistic issue. When Giuliano complains about the bracing north wind, he uses a word, rovaio, that provokes commentary: “Accostiamvici—disse Giuliano—ché questo ro¬ vaio, che tutta mattina ha soffiato, acciò fare ci conforta” ‘ “Let’s huddle together,” said Giuliano, “because this rovaio that has blown all morning encourages us to do that” ’ (Dionisotti ed., p. 77). Ercole, who professes greater comfort in speaking Latin rather than the vernacular, construes the meaning of this specific Tuscanism by referring to its usage in con¬ text: “Io non ho altra fiata cotesta voce udito ricordare, che voi, Mag¬ nifico, Rovaio avete detto, e per aventura se io udita l’avessi, intesa non l’averei, se la stagione non la mi avesse fatta intendere, come ora fa” ‘Never before have I heard this word rovaio that you, Magnifico, pro¬ nounced; yet even if I had heard it, I wouldn’t have understood it if the weather hadn’t made me grasp its meaning’ (78). Ercole’s act of inter¬ pretation initiates a discussion about language in general and about the Florentine vernacular in particular. This motif recurs at the beginning of books 2 and 3 when on successive days the speakers, “freddo per lo vento di tramontana” ‘cold from the north wind’ (132), reassemble around Carlo’s fireplace, until the wind finally dies down: “Ora si tace e niuno strepito fa” ‘Now it is quiet and makes no din’ (186). The image of a community huddled for warmth and protection dominates the Prose, as it does Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, furnishing a metonymy for asylum against the storms that rage in margins of the text. Language provides a resilient medium of exchange and protection, a civilizing force that shelters humanity from tumult. The challenge is to recognize what may be permanent in this civilizing force. As cultures change, so do their dominant forms of signification. Bembo pays homage to Michelangelo, Raphael, and other artists who labor to preserve their own visual forms while they retrieve from the past yet earlier forms that might instruct future generations: “Tanto più sé dovere essere della loro fatica lodati si credono, quanto essi più alle antiche cose fanno per somiglianza ravicinare le loro nuove” ‘So much the more do they think they should be praised for their labors as they fashion their own new works to compare with ancient ones’ (183). The verb ravicinare ‘draw near to, compare’ implies that Bembo perceives change as part of value itself. Modern works approximate those of the ancients without duplicating them. At the same time the verb s’accostono

9°

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

‘approach’ implies that for both ancients and moderns perfection may be an unattainable goal: “Sanno e veggono che quelle antiche più alla perfezion dell’arte s’accostano, che le fatte da indi innanzi’’ ‘They know and see that those ancient works approach the perfection of art more nearly than later ones’ (183). One can approach perfection only by degrees and with limited success. Bestrewn with ruins and swarming with tourists, sixteenth-century Rome inspires countless artists and sculptors. Its fragments disseminate past culture and challenge the present imagination: Questa città . . . vede tutto il giorno a sé venire molti artefici di vicine e di lontane parti, i quali le belle antiche figure di marmo e talor di rame, che o sparse per tutta lei qua e là giacciono o sono publicamente e privatamente guardate e tenute care, . . . con istudio cercando, nel picciolo spazio delle loro carte o cere la forma di quelli rapportano, e poscia, quando a fare essi alcuna nuova opera intendono, mirano in quegli essempi. (183) Every day Rome sees artisans come to her from far and near; carefully seek¬ ing out the beautiful ancient shapes of marble and copper that lie scattered here and there or are kept and tended publicly and privately. . . , they re¬ produce such forms in the cramped space of their sketchbooks and wax models; and then, when they wish to fashion some new work of their own, they consult these models.

Conversely, this invasion of visitors who study and produce art replicates an earlier invasion of barbarian armies who treated the original artifacts with less kindness, and it figures an ultimate invasion of time itself that tramples everything underfoot. In this whirligig of change Rome remains Rome precisely because its relics survive, “per le sue molte e riverende reliquie, infino a questo dì a noi dalla ingiuria delle nimiche nazioni e del tempo’’ ‘through its many honored relics now spared for us from the ravages of enemy nations and time’ (183). Implicit in Bembo’s image of Rome is the idea of a plundering that can be either corrosive or beneficent. Barbarian hordes pillage the city’s relics in ignorance and confusion, but visiting artists excavate them to improve their art. Time lacerates them all indifferently, but with contra¬ dictory effects. Linguistic change is one effect. In his prologue to book 2 Bembo traces the vernacular’s development from ancient Latin as a natural and even desirable sequence of events, though one achieved through struggle and conflict. The dominant figure is an agonistic con¬ tention inscribed in succedere ‘win,’ a verb that evokes the victorious out¬ come of combat: “È ora, monsignor messer Giulio, e a questi ultimi secoli successa alla latina lingua la volgare; et è successa così felicemente,

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH IN ITALY

gi

che già in essa, non pur molti, ma ancora eccelend scrittori si leggono” ‘Now, my lord Giulio, in these last centuries the vernacular has won out over Latin, and it has won out so felicitously that already at least some, if not many, excellent writers can be read’ (128). Not all effects, how¬ ever, bode well. The long discussion of linguistic change in the middle of book 1 discloses a history full of retractions and accommodations that exist side by side in unstable union. This history unfolds in a dialogue between Ercole Strozzi and Federigo Fregoso. The former recounts a theory proposed by Leonardo Bruni in 1435 and promptly refuted by Flavio Biondo.9 It holds that the grammar and syntax of classical Latin were far too complex for everyone in an¬ tiquity to master, and that as a consequence in ancient Rome there ex¬ isted side by side with Latin a less inflected plebeian speech similar to modern Italian. From this language the vernacular has descended. Er¬ cole is appalled that modern Italians should cultivate a language con¬ temned by ancient writers, ‘‘non solamente la meno pregiata favella e men degna da’ Romani riputata, ma ancora la rifiutata e del tutto per vile scacciata dalle loro scritture” ‘not only the less valued language deemed unworthy by the Romans themselves, but also rejected and to¬ tally expunged from their literature as base’ (81). Worse, modern Ital¬ ians actually dare to inscribe this language in their literature: ‘‘Laonde e di molta presonzione potremmo essere dannati, poscia che noi nelle lettere quello che i romani uomini hanno schifato, seguitiamo” ‘We can be accused of grand presumption since we pursue in our writing what Rome shunned’ (81). Federigo, following Biondo’s argument, tries to refute Ercole’s history. The lack of written traces from antiquity only proves that such a language did not exist: ‘‘Se ella stata fosse lingua a quelle stagioni, se ne vederebbe alcuna memoria negli antichi edifici e nelle sepolture” ‘If this language had existed at that time, some memory of it would survive in inscriptions on ancient buildings and tombstones’ (84). Federigo defends his claim at great expense. In place of an irenic vision of linguistic and literary history in which Italian has passed with unbroken continuity from an¬ cient times to the present, he offers a savage and turbulent one. The vernacular originated in a moment of violence. It began when barbarians invaded Italy and contaminated Latin with their own foreign tongues: “Ella cominciamento pigliasse infino da quel tempo, nel quale incom¬ inciarono i Barbari ad entrare nella Italia e ad occuparla” ‘Its beginning

PP- 222-25.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

123

divine sun,’ a gender-marked noun that could refer to either her hus¬ band or the deity: Tal io, qualor il caldo raggio e vivo del divin Sole onde nudrisco il core più de l’usato lucido lampeggia, movo la penna, mossa da l’amore interno, e senza ch’io stessa m’aveggia di quel ch’io dico le Sue lodi scrivo. So, whenever the warm and living ray of the divine Sun, with which I nourish my heart, flashes more than its usual light, I move my pen, impelled by inner love, and without realizing what I say, I inscribe his praises.

The object of her writing, like the object of her pursuit, may be praise of her husband or praise of God or the praise of both simultaneously. Colonna’s language suspends each possibility as her speaker confesses, “senza ch’io stessa m’aveggia.’’ More powerfully than Petrarch’s female beloved, Colonna’s male be¬ loved stands in for the patriarchal God with his masculine-gendered qualities. Colonna nonetheless questions the grounds of that homology through a conspicuous play on the cultural and linguistic associations of gender. God is a perfectly spiritual being and therefore physically sexless, but Colonna endows this being with feminine attributes of maternal nourishment and healing power (“onde nudrisco il core”) in addition to masculine attributes of warmth and generative power (“il caldo raggio e vivo’’).14 Scripture itself assigns these attributes to the Paraclete ‘Comforter’ of John 14.16, whom later exegetes associate with the dove of Psalm 55 andjahweh’s servant in Isaiah 42. As it happens, the model of Petrarch’s sonnet 311 poses a similar ambiguity of gender identity and divinity in terms that Gesualdo’s com¬ mentary would foreground. Grieving for Laura, Petrarch’s speaker ex¬ claims that death should have no dominion over goddesses, “ché ’n dee non credev’io regnasse Morte’’ ‘because I did not believe that Death reigns over goddesses.’’ In glossing this line Gesualdo acknowledges dis¬ comfort with attributing divinity to the female beloved. From a Christian perspective Laura’s soul is immortal, but not divine: “Perche credea securamente, e per fermo, che non regnasse morte in DEE, stimando egli M.L. esser non mortale Donna, ma Dea immortale’’ ‘Because he securely

14For feminine attributes associated with the deity from the thirteenth century on, see Caroline Walker Rynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berke¬ ley: University of California Press, 1982), chapter 4.

1

24

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

and firmly believed that death did not reign among goddesses, thinking that Laura was not a mortal lady but an immortal goddess’ (cccxxxviv). Colonna, it would seem, is responding to the problem by endowing God with human maternal qualities, by assimilating her beloved to God’s mas¬ culine identity, and by associating herself with the gendered and generic activities of both. Whether the male object of Colonna’s regard is Fran¬ cesco d’Avalos or God, he takes on her nurturing qualities while retain¬ ing his own conventionally gendered ones, returning the love that she shows in her song of praise. Colonna’s complex poem spectacularly tests these relationships. In its octave the male bird displays the power of song (“in tal modo can¬ tando”). When Colonna’s speaker herself assumes that power in the sestet (“movo la penna”), she casts off any traces of restriction or con¬ finement that may have been imputed to her femininity (“che par ch’oltra il poter la lingua snode”). Henceforth she shares in divine powers of generation and illumination previously defined as masculine (“più de l’usato lucido”). At the same time she inscribes her feminine identity in the grammatical endings of mossa and stessa. This identity empowers her relationship to her husband and the deity as though she were their Pe¬ trarchan lover: “Movo la penna, mossa da l’amore.” The juxtaposition of the active, and therefore culturally masculine, verb “movo” with the passive feminine participle “mossa” fuses these masculine and feminine qualities without regard to biological sex. Even the noun la penna ‘feather, pen,’ a metonymy for her active ability to write and a sign of her affinity with the feathered bird whose song she emulates, proclaims its mixed status as a linguistically gendered feminine substantive that refers to a culturally gendered masculine activity. Rooted in grammatical rules about gender, these tensions release pow¬ erful energies in Colonna’s rewriting of Petrarch. Her poetic addresses follow the rules of grammar to the extent that they observe standard forms of linguistic propriety, but they bend and manipulate the rules of the Petrarchan lyric as the speaker asserts her feminine identity. Colonna thus generates a new view of Petrarch’s authority by working through conflicts of gender inscribed in Petrarchan constructions. These conflicts devolve upon the struggle for a language that is not wholly new, taking words from the mouths of others to see how they fit in one’s own. Ac¬ cording to Mikhail Bakhtin, “not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into pri¬ vate property; many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien.”15 In

15Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 293.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

!25

the light of commentaries on Petrarch’s poetry and of discussions about alternative ways of textual understanding promoted by them, Colonna’s poetry redistributes Petrarch’s authority. Instead of projecting one une¬ quivocal, univocal set of meanings, it projects several possible meanings through its transposition of grammatical rules. As these meanings be¬ come available in successive cognitive encounters, they challenge the hierarchal classifications implied in any outworn conception of the Pe¬ trarchan code. Colonna’s most sustained evocations of Petrarch occur in her Rime amorose. A prominent example is sonnet 15, “Occhi miei, oscurato è il nostro sole’’ ‘My eyes, darkened is our sun.’ Here a metonymy of bright¬ ness for the male beloved, sole ‘sun,’ yields in the poem’s second line to the feminine luce, “così l’alta mia luce a me sparita’’ ‘so is my great light separated from me.’ The octave’s profusion of feminine rhymes (sparita, salita, sbandita, fornita) points to its major topic of concern, the speaker’s wish that her beloved might reciprocally long for her in heaven: “Forse, o che spero? il mio tardar li dole’’ ‘Perhaps, O dare I hope? my delay causes him sorrow.’ She seeks a rhetorical accommodation of masculine and feminine attributes in a transcendent union, but the poem’s syntac¬ tic and semantic parallelisms resist any simple conjunction of them. Colonna’s poem directly echoes Petrarch’s sonnet 275. The latter’s speaker addresses his eyes, ears, and feet as accusatory interlocutors who have blamed him for Laura’s death. Through a series of corrections he argues his defence in the first quatrain. The departure of his sun has not brought permanent darkness, for it lets him hope that Laura awaits him elsewhere: Occhi miei, oscurato è

’1

nostro sole,

anzi è salito al cielo, et ivi splende, ivi il vedreme anchora, ivi n’attende.

My eyes, darkened is our sun, rather it has risen to Heaven and there shines, there we shall see it again, there it awaits us.

The speaker recognizes that he has not caused Laura’s death, nor can he blame himself or allow himself to be blamed for it: “dunque perché mi date questa guerra?’’ ‘therefore why do you fight against me?’ By making these rhetorical corrections, Petrarch’s speaker recovers his self¬ esteem. His impassioned response signals his moral redemption. Commenting upon this sonnet, Gesualdo traces the speaker’s rhetor¬ ical trajectory as a mirror of his self-division: “Qui ne ragiona co gli occhi, e cogli orecchi; e coi piedi; perche non gli dieno piu guerra, non

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

126

essendo egli stato loro cagione di tanta perdita” ‘Here he argues with his eyes, ears, and feet that they should not attack him since he did not cause their loss’ (cclxxxvv). Gesualdo notes the repeated use of anzi as a corrective device in lines 2 and 12, and he remarks about its adversarial function: “ANZI corrigendosi dice, e salito 8c andato al cielo . . .ANZI corrigendosi dice, che laudino LUI, colui, Dio intendendo” ‘“Rather”: correcting himself, he says instead she has ascended and gone to heaven; . . . “Rather”: correcting himself he says they should instead praise God’ (cclxxxvv—cclxxxvir).

Gesualdo

consequently

understands

Petrarch’s

poem as a rhetorical contest between opposing sides of the speaker’s psyche, a masculine agon waged in the name of self-discovery. These assumptions run against the grain of Colonna’s poem, whose speaker appropriates the first line of Petrarch’s sonnet. Though in the last line of her octave she transforms Petrarch’s “e di nostro tardar forse li dole” ‘and perhaps she is pained by our delay,’ she resists the latter’s corrective logic and adversarial ethos. She pursues instead a rhetoric of association and readjustment: E se pietà ancor può quant’ella sòie, ch’indi per Lete esser non può sbandita, e mia giornata ho con suo’ pie’ fornita, forse, o che spero? il mio tardar li dole.

And if pity yet could do as much as it should, since there it cannot be dispersed by Lethe, and I have furnished my day’s journey with its feet, perhaps, O dare I hope, my delay causes him sorrow.

The rhyme of “ella sòie” in line 5 with “nostro sole” in line 1 ironizes the speaker’s relationship with her beloved. As a noun in line 1, the word sole figures him as a shining ‘sun.’ As a verb in line 5, however, sole indicates the extent to which pity should constrain her. The speaker nonetheless refuses to succumb to pity. Colonna’s process of accom¬ modation works through this refusal. When her beloved was alive, the speaker’s eyes affirmed his worth and value, “l’abito onesto, il ragionar cortese, / quando un cor tante in sé virtuti accolse” ‘his upright integrity, his courteous civility when one heart gathered together so many virtues unto itself.’ Now that he is dead, they affirm her deepest loss: Quanto la nova libertà menerebbe poi che mort’è colui che tutto intese, che sol ne ’1 mostrò il Ciel, poi se ’1 ritolse.

127

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

How much this new freedom grew for me since he who means everything to me has died, that heaven only showed him to us and then withdrew him unto itself.

Gesualdo had commented upon Petrarch’s double use of anzi as a form of correction, but Colonna’s speaker proceeds through a less obvious means that asserts the rightness of heaven’s action. Again the homophonic sol appears, this time figuring neither the beloved as ‘sun’ nor any constraint upon her behavior (sole ‘should’), but rather the total transience (sol ‘only’) of earthly delight, “che sol ne

’1 mostrò il Ciel.’’

She accepts heaven’s design, and through her acceptance comes to terms with her grief. When Colonna’s speaker pursues her search for God, she hesitates to question God’s plan, but vestiges of such a questioning nonetheless haunt her recall of Petrarch’s poems. Sonnet 74 of her Rime amorose, “Spinse il dolor la voce e poi non ebbe’’ ‘Sorrow impelled my voice, but then it did not possess,’ clearly echoes Petrarch’s sonnet 345, a poem whose crabbed syntax calls into question its speaker’s trust in divine prov¬ idence. The plural subject in Petrarch’s first quatrain, amor et dolor, com¬ mands a singular verb, spinse, which in turn governs lingua either as a direct object complemented by aviata (‘accustomed to lament and say of her’) or as the subject of dir di lei after spinse (‘they incited my tongue to say of her’): Spinse Amor et dolor ove ir non debbe la mia lingua aviata a lamentarsi, a dir di lei per ch’io cantai et arsi quel che, se fusse ver, torto sarebbe.

Love and sorrow incited my tongue [trans, mod.], accustomed to lamenting, toward where it should not go: to say of her for whom I sang and burned that which, if it were true, would be wrong.

As Petrarch’s syntax transgresses its grammatical order, so the blasphe¬ mies that it narrates transgress the moral order. Love and sorrow impel the speaker’s tongue to go where it ought not and to speak about Laura in such a way that his claims, even if they were true, should not be uttered: “Et ben m’acqueto, et me stesso consolo; / ne vorrei rivederla in questo inferno’’ ‘And I do grow calm and console myself, nor would I wish to see her again here in this hell.’ Vellutello’s commentary untan¬ gles the logic of this denial. To wish that Laura might return to life casts reproof upon her salvation by willing for her a less desirable state than

128

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

heavenly bliss: “Perche quando cosi seguito fosse, egli havrebbe mostrato di curar si poco del ben di lei” ‘Because if his wish to reclaim her were granted, it would have shown that he cared very little about her best interest’ (i24v). Colonna rewrites Petrarch’s poem to articulate this questioning in yet more complex terms. Following conventional rules of grammar, her first words realign Petrarch’s singular verb with a singular subject, “Spinse il dolor la voce” ‘Sorrow impelled my voice,’ but Colonna’s inverted syntax allows for an ambiguity. What is the verb’s subject and what is its object? Is it possible that the speaker thinks of her voice as impelling her sorrow, which now results as a product of her song? Spinse il dolor la voce e poi non ebbe per sì bella cagion lo stile accorto, ma del palese error nascosta porto la pena, tanto al cor poscia n’increbbe. Sorrow impelled my voice and then it did not have a crafty style for such a fine topic, but, concealed in obvious error, it bore its pain to such an extent that afterwards it regretted it within its heart.

The ensuing lines act out this imprecision with reference to the end of her song: Il tristo canto, che col tempo crebbe, più noia altrui eh’a me stessa conforto temo che porga, e al ver tanto vien corto che per il suo miglior tacer devrebbe. I fear that my sad song that grew with time might bring more annoyance to another than comfort to me, and in truth it is so deficient that, for its own betterment, it should remain silent.

Who is this altrui who overhears the poem? Is it the beloved? Or may it be Petrarch, the poet “chi più Elicona onora” ‘who most honors Heli¬ con,’ with whom the speaker enters into dialogue? Colonna acknowl¬ edges Petrarch as her illustrious predecessor, but yet she asserts in the first tercet that his verse hardly fulfilled his own needs, let alone hers or her beloved’s: Né giova a me, né a quel mio lume santo; ch’ai suo valor ed al tormento è poco quanto può dir chi più Elicona onora.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

129

And it avails neither me nor my holy light, for whatever the poet who most honors Helicon can say, it means little with respect to his valor and my torment.

Colonna’s account comes into conflict with Petrarch’s because his ac¬ count fails to dramatize her particular story. Elected to serve in the de¬ fence of holy right, Colonna’s beloved has died a glorious death that merits eternal reward. Elected to celebrate his good deeds, her speaker will be saved through the service that she performs. Unlike Petrarch’s lover, who does not understand why Laura has died, Colonna’s speaker knows that God has a plan and she may not contravene it. As she directs her faith to divine providence, she assents to Cardinal Pole’s advice to believe “as though faith alone could save her’’ and to act “as though her salvation depended solely on works.’’ Already this outlook challenges some theological claims asserted in commentaries on Petrarch’s model. In the sestet of sonnet 345, for example, Petrarch’s speaker professes to reconcile his will to God’s. The vision of his internal eye provides illumination, whether through the light of reason or the prompting of his heart. Thus Petrarch con¬ cludes: Ché più bella che mai con l’occhio interno Con li angeli la veggio alzata a volo A pie’ del suo et mio Signore eterno.

For more beautiful than ever I see her with my internal eye, risen in flight with the angels to the feet of her and my eternal Lord.

In his commentary, Sylvano da Venafro notes the speaker’s repentance: “Mostra pentirse di quando mai si lamento di M.L., scusandosi che l’amor e’1 dolor ne fur cagion’’ ‘The poem shows that he repents of the times that he lamented Laura, with the excuse that love and sorrow provided a reason for it’ (ccviiv). From Colonna’s perspective, this re¬ pentance seems forced and unconvincing. Not only does Petrarch’s speaker fall short of deserving God’s grace, but, even if he were able to earn grace, he fails to show how he might go about doing so. He has not yet reached an appropriate understanding about grace. Colonna tries to repair the breach. She shows how God’s grace comes to her speaker, how she accepts it, and how others might emulate her. She displaces her grief but refuses to deny its tremendous force. By lay¬ ing bare its effect upon her, she confronts it more honestly than Petrarch did. In this respect her sexual identity proves to be an asset. As a woman

130

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

she may grant her emotions a compensatory indulgence that society with¬ holds from men. Her husband and her Heavenly Father have taught her to subordinate her will to theirs, but subordination does not mean aban¬ donment. Unlike many men who are trained to do otherwise, Colonna’s speaker knows how to dissociate her longing for what might be from her acceptance of what is. Self-restraint confers upon her a particular strength: Tempo è ch’ardendo dentro ascoso il foco mai sempre sé di fuor rasciughi ’1 pianto, e sol d’intorno al cor rinasca e mora. It is time that I conceal the flame burning inside me even if I dry my tears on the outside, and only within my heart might it be born again and die. By fusing her self-restraint with socially approved ways of expressing her emotion, and by reordering both within the context of a Neoplatonic discourse about sublimated virtue, Colonna clears the ground for her revaluation of Petrarchan style. This new perspective incorporates Neoplatonic figurations, but it sit¬ uates them in a complex relationship to religious values on the one hand and to personal and political values on the other. Colonna s association with Valdesian heterodoxy authorizes her acts of piety and devotion along with her reading of and meditation upon Scripture. At the same time her subscription to Neoplatonic modes of thought can authorize key logical distinctions between sex and gender that affirm woman as man’s equal in her capacity for virtue and doing public good. Her op¬ ponents might respond to these distinctions by conceding some aspects of each argument while denying others. With piety, for example, con¬ servators of the status quo might grant women s superiority to men in such feminine virtues as patience, humility, compassion, and longsuffering while attributing such advantages to a prior weakness. Women can be virtuous in these respects only because they lack the complemen¬ tary masculine virtues of courage, self-assurance, imperturbability, and decisiveness.16 These arguments begin to unravel when the subject belongs to an elite class. Widows of high station count as exceptions to the rules of gender

"’Maclean, Renaissance Notion, pp. 20, 64. For upper-class religious women writers who expose contradictions in the ideological association of female chastity, silence, and obedi¬ ence, see Margaret W. Ferguson, “A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers,” in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 93—1

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

13»

when notions of class or kind, genus or genre, redefine their service to the state. Because the widowed noblewoman needs to care for her hus¬ band’s estate, itself a privileged component of the larger public order, she is allowed to manage some kinds of business, deal in property, and appear in court. Under the guise of a rhetorical fiction that keeps power in the male line, a widowed madre di famiglia is in charge of the family ship freighted with its master’s goods.17 Though many activities conven¬ tionally gendered as masculine still remain off-limits to her, those that she pursues in her husband’s interest mark her as man’s equal in at least her legal standing according to sixteenth-century Italian civil law. Colonna’s widowhood earns her this measure of independence as a guardian of wealth, but the same liberties granted to her in the social, economic, political, and legal world fall short in the ideological realm. Colonna’s widowhood anoints her with a distinct but precarious in¬ dependence, a “bitter liberty’’ as Giangiorgio Trissino defined the wi¬ dow’s lot.18 She has inherited the social rank, economic function, and political office of her deceased husband, and thus she inhabits a field that culture designates as masculine, according to the rules of gender. However qualified her freedom might be, she now experiences some of the uncertainties typically felt by men. Her gravitation toward heterodox religious ideas signals the crisis. The roles assumed by cultural expecta¬ tions come to be seen as arbitrary and limiting, wholly a matter of con¬ ventional acceptance. Social rules of gender that determine masculine and feminine position and prerogative result from a historical process. As heterodoxy puts into question conventional assumptions about the roles of men and women and the rules that govern their behavior, it makes available paradigms and rationales for different behavior. Scrip¬ ture itself, especially as read and interpreted in a Reformed light, affords new paradigms. One example from Colonna’s Rime amorose is sonnet 53, “Provo tra duri scogli e fiero vento” T test among hard rocks and strong wind.’ The poem rewrites Petrarch’s sonnet 189, “Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio” ‘My ship laden with forgetfulness,’ but it also rewrites two scrip¬ tural texts that invite theological applications. The first is Proverbs 31.14, a distich that from a distinctly male perspective celebrates the qualities of “a vertuous woman.” Its speaker compares his spouse to the transport l7Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 215-16; for women’s rights to make contracts and to be the subjects of them, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women in Politics” in History of Women, ed. Davis and Farge, pp. 167-83, pp. 168-69. 1KQuoted in Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, p. 72; but for qualifications see Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 56-63.

132

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

of foreign merchants: “She is like the shippes of marchants: she bringeth her fode from a farre.” One implication of this navigational trope is that when a husband’s seas prove stormy, his wife faces shipwreck. Her fate depends on his. A second scriptural text for Colonna’s poem likewise projects a masculine counter-voice. It is Psalm 69,

Saue me, o God. for

the waters are entred euen to my soule.” According to mainstream Prot¬ estant readings, this psalm represents David’s beleaguerment in a world of masculine competition, intrigue, violence, and self-assertion. The singer consoles himself with a strong appeal to faith in times of great trouble: “I am come into depe waters, and the streames runne ouer me. I am wearie of crying, my throte is drye.” Calvin s reading of this psalm affirms the Christian doctrine of justification by faith and, as a corollary, the doctrine of predestination: “Hence believers may in some measure perceive the truth of what we said at the outset

viz. predestination duly

considered does not shake faith, but rather affords the best confirmation of it” (Institutes 3.24: Beveridge trans., 2.249). In a world where ignorant armies clash by night, Psalm 69 proposes that the safety of both men and women lies in God’s hands. In these contexts Colonna’s poem prompts a difficult question: if God has ordained that her husband die young, what is her role as a widow after his death, and what is her specific role in times of great trouble? Provo tra duri scogli e fiero vento fonde di questa vita in fragil legno; l’alto presidio e ’1 mio fido sostegno tolse l’acerba morte in un momento. Veggio il mio male e ’1 mio rimedio spento, il mar turbato e l’aer d’ira pregno, d’atra tempesta un infallibil segno, e ’1 valor proprio al mio soccorso lento. I test among hard rocks and strong wind the waves of this life in a fragile bark; harsh death seizes my high defense and my faithful endurance in a single moment. I see my harm, and my remedy spent, the sea disturbed, and the air teeming with fury, an infallible sign of dark storm, and the valor appropriate for my aid slack.

The inverted word order at the end of the first quatrain and a suspension of the verb’s subject, morte, enforce the speaker’s painful recognition that her husband, her defense and support, is dead. If, according to the rules of her society, a woman is defined by her spouse’s identity, then what becomes of her own identity upon his demise? Death has seized the male sponsor of her privileged existence, and everything conspires against

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

1

33

her: the harm that afflicts her, nature itself, and the valor that abandons her. Taken at face value, Petrarch’s model hardly suggests these possibili¬ ties. Its allegory concerns the speaker’s amatory frustrations, “un vento umido eterno / di sospir’, di speranze et di desio’’ ‘a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires.’ As it happens, however, at least three of Petrarch’s sixteenth-century commentators interpreted the poem ac¬ cording to a religious schema hospitable to social concerns. Thus Brucioli glosses Amor as a guide “chi brama di sommergerla” ‘who yearns to sink the ship’ (i3iv) and Castelvetro glosses it as “la guida) che come nemico la condurrà negli scogli” The guide: who, like an enemy, will drive the ship onto the rocks’ (333). Fausto notes that the Creator pro¬ vides aids to avert this disaster. They are justice and religion: “Per il remo la elettione; come la naue ha due ali di remi, cosi l’anima nostra ha due ale, della giustitia: & per questa intendiamo le vertu morali; Se della religione per questa le intellettiue” ’The oar stands for the power of election: just as the ship has two banks of oars, so the soul has two wings: justice, through which we mean the moral virtues; and religion, through which we mean the intellectual virtues’ (7U). Apparently refer¬ ring to the exercise of will in a society structured according to principles of justice and religion, Fausto uses the problematic term “elettione.” Evoking the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine of election, it posits justice and religion as signs of God’s promise and testimony. Salvation is assured to those whom God has chosen. Colonna’s sestet summons faith in God’s promise. Echoing the second verse of Psalm 69, “I sticke fast in the depe myre, where no staie is,’’ the speaker disclaims her fear of sinking into sand, and she distinguishes between the false port of death as an end to life and the true port of salvation as life’s goal:

Non ch’io sommerga in le commosse arene temo, né rompa in perigliose sponde, ma duolmi il navigar priva di spene. Almen se morte il ver porto m’asconde, mostrimi il falso suo, ché chiare e amene ne parran le sue irate e turbide onde.

I am not afraid that I might sink into the shifting sands, nor that I might be wrecked on perilous shores, but I do grieve navigating deprived of hope. At least if death hides the true port from me, it might show me that his port is the false one because his angry and turbid waves will appear clear and pleasant.

134

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

The speaker’s fear of losing hope, “il navigar priva di spene,’’ gives way to faith in God’s promise. As despair represents a blockage of grace, an impediment to the spirit that disturbs human nature, so faith transforms human nature in every way. Confident that God’s will must prevail, the speaker is assured of the outcome in her spiritual favor. For a woman of high station such as Vittoria Colonna, the

bitter

liberty’’ of widowhood has brought trial as well as independence. Colonna’s contamination of the Petrarchan model with scriptural texts that the model itself evokes points to a cultural crisis impinging upon her identity as a woman. Inversely, the linguistic conformity of Colonna s style to the official Petrarchan model endorsed by Bembo points to the problem of authority motivating her composition. Colonna s choice of Petrarch marks her elite status as a member of the ruling class, collec¬ tively committed to the linguistic program that Bembo hoped would help to unify Italy. Her recall of Scripture, however, marks her intellectual distinction as a member of heterodox movements committed to religious and social reform. On the one hand Colonna capitalizes upon her access to official, orthodox, and legitimate speech, replete with all its classifying rules. On the other hand, enabled by her social prestige, she is able to break, or at least to manipulate, ideological rules in order to assert her own convictions. Her flexible approach to linguistic rules of gender an¬ ticipates a revision of socially constructed gender relations that inhibit human initiative. Colonna’s poetry represents its speaker’s effort to reclaim her selfhood by integrating knowledge about herself with knowledge that she has learned elsewhere. In its debt to Petrarch it shows that even apparently neutral components of Petrarch’s poetry are not neutral, that even con¬ ventional rules about grammatical gender that inform its style embody cultural conflicts and social struggles within the larger community. Pe¬ trarch’s sixteenth-century commentators help to bring these conflicts into the open and Colonna’s poetry translates them onto a new plane of recognition. In this process Colonna demonstrates a tenacious au¬ thority to generate her own poetry as well as to possess Petrarch s, to express a mature tolerance for ambiguity with an increasing openness toward divergent ways of thinking.

Veronica Gambara and the Gender of Rule The poetry of Veronica Gambara (1485-1550) is more overtly political than Vittoria Colonna’s. Born into a noble family and then married into another family of considerable wealth and political prestige, Gambara

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

1

35

was presented to Pope Leo X and King Francis I at Bologna in 1515 and to Pope Paul III and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V upon the latter’s coronation at Bologna in 1535. During her residence at Bologna that year, her home became a literary salon for Bembo and Italy’s elite.19 In her poetry Gambara addresses the leaders of Europe as one who be¬ longs to their social class, an intimate who urges them on behalf of Christian Europe to reconcile their political differences in diplomatic accord instead of war and senseless bloodshed. Gambara’s privileged status nonetheless comes at a price. It entails a responsibility for those whom she has engendered as well as for those whom she governs. After the death of her husband, Count Giberto X, Lord of Correggio, in 1518, she was left at the age of thirty-two to protect not only the territories that her husband ruled in and around Romagna, but also the interests of her minor children. Gambara assumes these responsibilities with con¬ viction and determination. Gender defers to genre or genus, class or kind that upholds the priorities of birth and entitlement. Gambara’s poetry dramatizes these responsibilities even when it is most Petrarchan. The conditions of its publication in the sixteenth cen¬ tury in fact mute its deeply political implications and emphasize the con¬ ventional

nature

of its

Petrarchism.

Printed

piecemeal

in various

collections and anthologies of Petrarchisti such as those edited in Venice by Gabriel Giolito in 1545, by Girolamo Ruscelli in 1553, and by Plinio Pietrasanta in 1553, it blends into an otherwise featureless chorus of Petrarchan voices.20 Nor has the modern academy remedied this treat¬ ment. To date, Gambara’s thirty-nine sonnets, two madrigals, two stanze, and one ballata have received no careful scholarly edition. Their most recent publication is Pia Mestica Chiappetti’s informal edition of 1879. Gambara’s political voice remains submerged despite the urgency of its appeal and the originality of its project. Gambara’s authority is a sixteenth-century understanding of Petrarch

19Cian, Un decennio, pp. 142-54. For biography see Clementina De Courten, Veronica Gambara: una gentildonna del cinquecento (Milan: Est, 1934), and Riccardo Finzi’s brief Uman¬ ità di Veronica Gambara (Reggio Emilia: Tipolitografia Emiliana, 1969). Comments on the poetry and its textual transmission occur in Mario Marcazzan, Romanticismo critico e coscienza storica (Florence: Marzocco, 1948), pp. 100-117, and Giorgio Santangelo, Il Petrarquismo del Bembo e di altri poeti (Rome: Istituto Editoriale Cultura Europanea, 1962), pp. 226-31. 20 Se e Fowler, Cornell University Catalogue, p. 433; and Louise Clubb and William Clubb, “Building a Lyric Canon: Gabriel Giolito and the Rival Anthologists, 1545-1590,“ Italica 68 (1991): 332-44. For Gambara’s transmission through modern anthologies see Amadeo Quondam, Petrarchismo mediato: Per una critica della forma antologia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), pp. 158-60, 188-90. For conditions of gender revision see Luciana Borsetto, “Narciso ed Eco: Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento,” in Nel cerchio della luna, ed. Marina Zancan (Venice: Marsilio, 1983), pp. 171-233.

13*5

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

filtered through perspectives on the Rime sparse available in commentar¬ ies. The opening lines of Gambara’s sonnet 4, composed in 1538 to honor a truce negotiated by Pope Paul III between Charles V and Francis I and also to gain papal favor for her son Girolamo, echo the concluding stanza of Petrarch’s canzone 128.21 Here Gambara s speaker addresses Charles and Francis as equals, foreign lords of emergent nations beyond the Alps whose anger and hatred for each other, “gli sdegni e 1 odio, threaten to destroy Europe: “Vinca gli sdegni e 1 odio vostro antico, / Carlo e Francesco, il nome sacro e santo / di Cristo” ‘May the sacred holy name of Christ conquer your scorn and your ancient hatred, Charles and Francis.’ Petrarch’s speaker addresses competing lords of northern Italy whose rivalrous designs—“l’odio et lo sdegno”

threat¬

ened to destroy Italy from within: “Piacciavi porre giù l’odio et lo sdegno, / ... in qualche honesto studio si converta” ‘Let it please you to conquer hatred and scorn, ... let it be converted to some virtuous study [trans, mod.]’ (104?! 10). Modern scholarship has not identified these lords with absolute certainty, but it has corrected the misimpres sions of commentators available to Gambara. Vellutello, for example, locates Petrarch’s canzone 128 in the context of Lewis of Bavaria’s struggle for recognition as Holy Roman Emperor in the 1320s. As Vellutello recounts the story, Lewis had taken advantage of border disputes between Lombard Guelphs and Ghibellines to enter Milan, cross the Apennines, and seek coronation in Rome: Essendo richiesto da Galeasso Visconte . . . d’aiuto contra la Guelfa fattione, laqual era dal Giovanni xxii. Pontifìce, che la corte teneva in Avignone, favorita, li mando seicento huomini d arme, . . . Ma il Bavaro di ciò poco curando, delibero voler passar in Italia 8c a Roma andarsi a far coronare.

(i3ir) Having been invited by Galeazzo Visconti of Milan ... as aid against the Guelph faction favored by Pope John XXII, Lewis sent

600

aimed men . . .

and then with little regard for his host, decided to sweep through Italy and move on to Rome to be crowned emperor there.

Vellutello’s scenario offers a proleptic account of French and Spanish invasions after 1494 and an uncanny forecast of Italian history in the 1530s. Gambara responds to this interpretation by urging Charles and Francis to shift their attention from Italy to a common enemy, the Turks who stand poised to invade Europe: 21 See De Courten, Veronica Gambara, pp. 68-70.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

137

L’arme vostre a domar l’empio nemico Di lui sian pronte; e non tenete in pianto Non pur l’Italia, ma l’Europa.

May your arms be ready to tame Christ’s unholy enemy, and do not hold in captive sorrow not only Italy but also all Europe.

Here the Turks are figured as a masculine enemy, nemico, ready to as¬ sault the feminine Italia and Europa in a reenactment of the opening lines of Petrarch’s canzone 128: “Italia mia, benché ’1 parlar sia in¬ darno / a le piaghe mortali / che nel bel corpo tuo sì spesse veggio” ‘My Italy, although speech does not aid those mortal wounds of which in your lovely body I see so many.’ The problem is that Charles and Francis have also focused their lustful attention upon Italy’s bel corpo in acts of public outrage. They too are nemici against whom Gambara har¬ nesses her energies. Because she is a woman whose own body can be identified with the bel corpo of Italy—indeed with all Europe viewed as a female body of valleys and hills, “cinge valle o colle aprico”—she is vulnerable to male aggression. As a potential Petrarchan donna, how¬ ever, she can be powerful over the men whom she addresses. Appeal¬ ing to her audience for pietà as Petrarch appealed in his sonnet 1, she may wither and transform male desire when she evokes Christ: “A voi si volge, e prega / Che de la greggie sue pietà vi prenda” ‘He turns to you and prays that you be taken with pity for his flock.’ Submitting Charles and Francis to the authority of her own desire, she envisions them as partners in a marriage, “Coppia reale,” as she channels their strength to defend Christendom: Possa più de lo sdegno in voi pietate Coppia reale, e un sol desio v’accenda Di vendicar chi Christo sprezza e nega.

May piety be stronger in you than scorn, royal couple, and may a single desire ignite you to vanquish those who hate Christ and deny him.

If her words mobilize Europe against a common enemy, so much the better. The Medusa tamed becomes a poet archetypalized. Gambara’s sonnet 24, “Ite, pensier fallaci e vana spene” ‘Go, lying thoughts and vain hopes,’ explores this taming of earthly erotic desires. Its key word is signor, the destination to which Gambara’s speaker urges her soul in direct address:

138

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

E tu, povr’ alma in tanti affanni involta, Slégati ornai, e al tuo Signor divino Leggiadramente i tuoi pensier rivolta. And you, poor soul, in such affliction bound, be released henceforth, and to your divine lord gracefully turn back your thoughts.

The speaker’s hortatory address marks a conversion of her will, a turn from the “Ciechi, ingordi desiri, accese voglie’’ ‘Blind, voracious desires and burning wants’ of line 2 toward the “fren de la ragion’’ ‘bridle of rea¬ son’ that liberates her in the second quatrain. Gambara’s poem evokes Pe¬ trarch’s sonnet 153, “Ite, caldi sospiri, al freddo core’’ ‘Go, hot sighs, to her cold heart,’ whose male speaker charts a comparable itinerary. In Pe¬ trarch’s poem, however, the speaker directs his sighs toward a forcible as¬ sault on the beloved, “s’ai segni del mio sol 1 aere conosco

if I know the

weather by the signs of my sun.’ As Castelvetro later emphasized, the speaker is looking directly at Laura for signs of her response.

Era in pre¬

senza di Laura quando fece questo sonetto’’ ‘He was in Laura’s presence when he composed this sonnet’ (291). Either the beloved will show mercy, and in that case the lover will find release from his torment, or she will show cruelty, and in that case he will know how vain are all his hopes:

Se

pur sua asprezza o mia stella n’offende, / sarem fuor di speranza et fuor d’errore’’ ‘If her cruelty or my star still strikes against us, we shall be out of hope and out of error.’ Whatever the outcome, Petrarch s speaker ac¬ tively, deliberately provokes an answer from his beloved. He has fashioned a rhetorical challenge that requires her to acknowledge him and to de¬ clare her attitude toward him. As though to concede that it would transgress the bounds of decorum for a female rhetor to confront her beloved as boldly as Petrarch does his, Gambara’s speaker fashions a different kind of voice and address. The human object of her “sospiri ardenti, acerbe doglie’’ ’passionate sighs, bitter pains’ is wholly absent. She therefore redirects her turbulent emotions toward another goal. It is the Signor ‘Lord’ of her soul ad¬ dressed in the first tercet, in the lines quoted above. The word Signor crosses a range of meanings that Petrarch’s comparable donna does not. In this late feudal society, it refers to a male lord who controls the ac¬ tivities of all his subordinates. He can be a benevolent father who nour¬ ishes and sustains those in his charge, or a tyrannical master who exacts duty, obligation, and even revenge. In a domestic situation he might be a spouse. In a religious context he could be God the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. Gambara’s address plays on all these meanings, with an ad¬ ditional resonance that comes from Petrarch s identification of his own

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

1

39

signor as Cupid, the god of Love who treats the speaker as a nemico ‘en¬ emy.’ From a Petrarchan perspective, then, Gambara’s speaker recon¬ ciles her soul with Love and with the demands that Love makes upon her. From a human perspective, however, she reconciles her soul with a love invoked by marriage, a devotion to her spouse in this life, and a dedication to his memory after death. From a religious perspective, she reconciles her soul with God, the true master of her affects, the unme¬ diated source of all love, and the goal of all happiness. As heterodox Lutheran ideas and Calvinist interpretations of Scripture infiltrated northern Italy in the decades between the Diet of Worms (1521) and the Council of Trent (1545-63), members of the nobility such as Gambara responded with curiosity and self-interest. Unlike Co¬ lonna, though also superbly educated in Scripture and the classics, Ve¬ ronica Gambara had few scholarly or technically theological aspirations, but, as her letters attest, she did keep track of Reformist developments with a critical intelligence and an awareness of the patristic writings upon which many Reformed ideas were based. As a human being she would earn or achieve her salvation like anyone else, whether though faith or works or, as Martin Bucer and Johannes Gropper argued in their ecu¬ menical Regensburg Colloquy (1541), through a synergistic justificatio duplex of God’s grace and the believer’s ethical motivation built upon it.22 As a woman who ruled over Correggio, Gambara could only examine the implications of this teaching for her own status as a protector of her sons’ inheritance. How might new religious doctrines affect the social order? What could be the effect on her own activities of Luther’s and Calvin’s revaluation of the individual’s worth? How might Gambara es¬ timate her calling? As the social practices and legal instititions of sixteenth-century Italy had decreed, whenever a woman has become the ruler of a state by virtue of noble birth, she performs the same offices as a man. Her worth de¬ pends upon status, not sex, in a legal setting where any argument for a specifically feminine kind of rule would have been tenuous.23 Generic kinds of behavior, whether masculine or feminine, are nonetheless cul¬ turally appointed to different roles. If only because governance requires virtues of reason, courage, and strength conventionally gendered as mas¬ culine, Gambara needs to take on these qualities of both sexes and ex¬ ercise virtues defined as both masculine and feminine in order to fulfill 22Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform: 1250—1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 405-7. For the effects of Reformist teaching on the social and political order of mon¬ archism in Italy see Rodolfo de Mattei, Il pensiero politico italiano nell’età della Controriforma, 2 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1984), 2:16-55. 23Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women, pp. 215-16.

140

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

her calling as a regent for her minor children. In managing her interests, Gambara succeeded well. By 1529 she had secured appointment for her younger son Girolamo under her brother Uberto, governor of Bologna. In 1541 she arranged for her elder son Ippolito to marry Chiara of Correggio, the heiress of her husband’s brother, thereby consolidating the rule of Correggio within the family.24 As regent of Correggio, situated between Modena and Ferrara, Gam¬ bara doubtless knew the Lutherans of Modena and the Calvinists of Fer¬ rara. Writing to Agostino Ercolani in 1534’ she welcomed the election of the reform-minded Paul III (1534-48) “perche ognuno di noi vi desi¬ dera più che non fanno gli ebrei il loro Messia

because each of us

wants you more than the Hebrews did their Messiah

(Rime e lettene, p.

206). She also welcomed in both Luther’s and Calvin’s teaching a politi¬ cal validation for secular authority against papal supremacy, foreign en¬ croachments, and pressures to consolidate and nationalize Italian rule.25 Though in letters to Lodovico Rosso she would disparage the Protestants as “i diavoli di Tedeschi” ‘German devils’ (159) and to Agostino Erco¬ lani she would dismiss Protestant movements in central Italy as “di quella nullità e di quella protesta” ‘of no account and mere protest’ (238), she might well have found Lutheran or Calvinist ideas appealing for several reasons. Apart from their religious fervor and pious condemnation of ec¬ clesiastical abuses, they stimulated a critique relevant to the position of a ruling woman in sixteenth-century Italy. According to Luther, a human subject has no free will in respect to anything above itself, but is elected by divine ordinance, imputed righteous by divine will, and predestined by divine pleasure in all that bears on salvation or damnation (“Bondage of the Will,” Dillenberger ed., p. 190). The subject, whether male or fe¬ male, becomes, in effect, an object of historical circumstances on the one hand and of God’s disposal on the other. To what extent, one might ask, does a woman’s identity depend upon her material conditions and upon the identity of the man who secures them for her

her husband, father,

sons or brothers who possess legal status in the eyes of the state? Sonnet 26 shows how Gambara reinvests the Petrarchan figuration of her speaker’s gender with a theological and ultimately political meaning. It opens with a strong assertion of predestination: Scelse da tutta la futura gente Gli eletti suoi l’alta bontà infinita 24De Courten, Veronica Gambara, pp. 94~972r>For the Reformers’ privileging of corporate aristocratic rule as a check upon potential tyranny, see de Mattei, Il pensiero, 2:56-99. For other background see Marina Zancan, donna,” in Letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 5:803—11.

La

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

1

41

Predestinati a la futura vita Sol per voler de la divina mente.

From the entire future race the supreme infinite Goodness chose his elect, predestined to future life only through the will of the divine intellect.

While this poem echoes no single text of Petrarch, it does summon sev¬ eral passages in morte di Laura that recount the beloved’s arrival in heaven and the speaker’s increasing desire to join her there. One is Petrarch’s sonnet 346, whose first quatrain imagines how the angels and saints must have greeted Laura: Li angeli electi et l’anime beate cittadine del Cielo, il primo giorno che Madonna passò, le fur intorno piene di meraviglia et di pietate.

The elect angels and blessed souls who are citizens of Heaven, the first day that my lady passed over, came around her full of wonder and reverence.

For most commentators Petrarch’s key word is pietate, and it evokes the classical associations of Virgil’s pietas. To Vellutello it conveys the angels’ courtly empathy with Laura’s mortal condition, especially for the pain that she suffered in her final illness, “per l’affanno sofferto nel suo mo¬ rire’’ ’for the pain suffered in her death’ (164'). To Gesualdo it conveys their cosmic sympathy for all humanity now that Laura has left the world and deprived it of her excellence, “che’l mondo con lui sia senza lei rimaso cieco e solo’’ ‘because along with him the world without her remained blind and lonely’ (ccclxiiip). To Bernardino Daniello it sig¬ nals classical reverence and respect, “cioè di dolcezza, e tenerezza” ‘that is, sweetness and tenderness’ (203^. Laura is unique and incom¬ parable, and not least for her good works through which she earned salvation. To other commentators of a heterodox or Protestant persuasion— Fausto da Longiano and Castelvetro at Modena and Antonio Brucioli at Ferrara—the key words are eletti and cittadine. With them, Petrarch’s text questions doctrinal issues about freedom of the will. Brucioli asserts that Laura was glad to end her earthly existence because she was destined for heaven all along: “Lieta di hauere cambiato albergo” ‘She was glad to have changed her temporary dwelling place’ (224')- Fausto claims that for the poet who imagines her entry into heaven, the experience is a mystical one. Earlier he had envied the blessed for their access to Laura:

142

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

“Sopra dice portar’ inuidia a quell anime beate, c hanno hor sua santa e dolce compagnia” ‘He says above that he bore envy to those blessed souls who now enjoy her holy and sweet company’ (i24v). Purified and illumined, he now awaits a sacred union with her, for which he too has been chosen. For Castelvetro the poem implies several kinds of election. It posits not only the election of angels and saints, but also Laura’s apoth¬ eosis through God’s grace: “Apotheosis) Deificatione di L” ‘Apotheosis: Laura’s deification’ (132*). Finally the poem affirms the speaker’s own predestined salvation: “Vltimamente il Petrarca si mostra fermo di se¬ guire la vita di Laura” ’Ultimately Petrarch shows that he is determined to follow Laura’s example” (132*). Among the chosen, some have died and passed on to heaven; others remain on earth where they promote God’s kingdom by living according to the Word of God. Petrarch s speaker joins the latter, “quelle, che anchora sono in questo mondo, & sono pero beate” ‘those who are still in this world and are nonetheless blessed’ (133*). For these saints faith is no mere assent to belief but a transformative experience, a fundamental reorientation and redirection of values in this life. Despite the joy of heaven, Laura is not happy there without her lover. The poem’s first tercet barely conceals a tension that undermines its apparent harmony and spiritual assurance. After announcing Laura s delight in heaven where she joins the most perfect souls, the speaker wishfully recounts her glance back toward earth: Ella, contenta aver cangiato albergo, si paragona pur coi più perfecti et parte ad or ad or si volge a tergo.

She, glad to have changed her dwelling, is equal to the most perfect souls, and still from time to time she turns back.

A conspicuous archaism, “et parte,” initiates the action. Where the sense of the verse demands a disjunctive “ma pur asserts instead the conjunctive “et parte.

but yet, Petrarch s speaker The strangeness of parte un¬

derscores the anomaly as a syncopated form of parimente ‘likewise, equally, also’ at a moment of indecision. Though Laura seems to enjoy heaven, her gesture of turning back implies a lingering attachment to earth. “Et parte” registers a confidence that its meaning in fact belies. Castelvetro understands this action as the predestined concurrence of God’s will with the speaker’s. To explain the verse he evokes Paul’s Epis¬ tle to the Hebrews: “Non è perfetta la sua allegrezza. Sente quello dell’apostolo a gli Hebrei 11.40” ‘Her joy is not perfect. This passage

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

!43

evokes Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews 11.40’ (133*). Paul’s text proclaims God’s providential design, according to which the ancients, despite their many good works, lacked the fulfillment that Christians may attain: “God prouiding a better thing for vs, that they without vs shulde not be made perfite’’ (Hebrews 11.40). In Castelvetro’s analogy, Laura’s gaze works its magic directly upon the speaker. It comes as a sign from heaven that redirects his will to God: “Ond’io voglie et pensier tutti al ciel ergo / perch’i’ l’odo pregar pur ch’i’ m’affretti’’ ‘And so I raise all of my desires and thoughts toward Heaven, for I hear her even pray that I may hasten.’ The word that Castelvetro uses to describe the speaker’s will is diterminatione ‘determination,’ itself an overdetermined word in the context of predestination: “Ond’io voglie) Diterminatione del P.” ‘And so ... my desires) Petrarch’s determination’ (133*). Petrarch’s speaker is the re¬ solved object of God’s election. Gambara’s poem accentuates a similar determination. Its second quat¬ rain poses God’s calling of the elect as a form of mystic union and as an act of invitation, invita, paronomastically a ‘calling into life’: Questi tali poi chiama, e dolcemente Seco gli unisce, ed a ben far gl’invita, Non per opra di lor saggia e gradita, Ma per voler di lui troppo clemente;

These such, then, he calls, and sweetly unites them to himself, and invites them to do good, not through any wise and well-approved work of their own, but through his all-too clement will.

The words that begin its last line, “ma per voler,’’ echo those in an equivalent position of the first quatrain, “sol per voler,’’ and the con¬ struction of the entire line contrasts with that of the preceding line, “Non per opra di lor saggia e gradita.’’ Human action, no matter how enlightened, well-intentioned, or well-performed, earns no merit without the grace of God. Not until divine will summons the individual, unites him or her to itself, and invites him or her to do good, can the individual achieve his or her potential. The speaker has accomplished efficacious deeds, “ben far,’’ only after God’s call to union. The poem’s symmetrical architecture enforces this distinction between deeds or acts performed outside the state of grace, and hence deemed to be of no merit, and those imputed to be righteous by the foreordain¬ ing will of God. Human beings achieve no righteousness in or of them¬ selves, but God imputes it to them. God considers or calls them just by choosing to do so. The verb chiama at the beginning of the second quat-

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

144

rain and the echoing participle chiamando initiating the first tercet both convey this sense of imputation; the startling repetition of giusti inscribes it as a doubling of God’s will in human deeds:

Chiamando li fa giusti, e giusti poi Gli essaita sì eh’a l’unico suo Figlio Li fa conformi e poco men ch’eguali.

By calling them he imputes them just, and as just individuals he exalts them so that to his only Son he makes them conformable and little less than equal.

After investing human beings with a righteousness that is not substan¬ tially theirs, God treats them like his children, “a l’unico suo Figlio / Li fa conformi.” In theological terms this relationship implies the child’s natal filiation to a parent promised in the sacrament of baptism. In the context of Petrarchan poetry and the speaker’s feminine gender, how¬ ever, it implies more. The speaker’s union with the only Son of Infinite Goodness insinuates a condensed metaphor for marriage. In Gambara’s poem the speaker’s election as bride of Christ compen¬ sates for any earthly trial she may currently endure, including the death of her mortal spouse and the social and political consequences of her widowhood. Entitled to his favor, she gains a serenity unavailable in any other relationship: Qual dunque potrà mai danno o periglio Ne l’ultimo de gFaltri estremi mali Da Cristo separar gli eletti suoi?

What harm or danger in the utmost of those other extreme ills will ever be able to separate his elect from Christ?

For a widow of noble calling like Veronica Gambara, conversant with Christian humanism and prompt to express her well-argued convictions and novel ideas, the Lutheran or Calvinist theology of election offers consolation on two fronts. With regard to personal salvation, it promises that the outcome rests in God’s hands. According to Luther it affords “the comfortable certainty that I please God, not by reason of the merit of my works, but by reason of his merciful favor promised to me” (“Bondage of the Will,” Dillenberger ed., p. 199). According to Jean Calvin it eliminates worries, strengthens the blessed in their unshakable faith, and frees them to devote their energies to what “God by his eternal

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

M5

and immutable counsel determined once and for all” (Institutes 3.21: Beveridge trans., 2.210). With reference to the author’s high station in this life, the idea of election valorizes Gambara’s governing authority in the world of human affairs, “recognizing it is a delegated jurisdiction from God” (Institutes 4.20: Beveridge trans., 2.668). As a member of the ruling class, the re¬ gent has been chosen by God to provide an example of good citizenship for others of lower rank, to labor on their behalf by punishing evil and protecting the good, and to serve in a responsible office as God’s deputy on earth. As Luther would say, she governs “because others need it,— that they may be protected and that the wicked may not become worse” (“Secular Authority,” Dillenberger ed., p. 373). By legitimizing secular authority in these terms, Protestant reform strengthens the claims of the ruling nobility against papal supremacy or Church privilege. In the case of Italy beset by the expansionist designs of the Valois monarchy and the Hapsburg empire, it would valorize the sectarian division of dukedoms against any national or monarchical state, legitimating the political ap¬ portionment of inherited territories as primary units of government. As regent of Correggio, Veronica Gambara survives with this vindication of neo-feudalism. Gambara’s intervention as a political poet responds to Colonna’s in¬ tervention as a theological poet in two ways. As in Colonna’s poetry, the speaker integrates knowledge about herself with a broader sort of knowl¬ edge that she has learned about politics, religion, social class, and cul¬ tural conflict. But just as Colonna’s poetry redistributes Petrarch’s authority in the wake of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries about its plurivocal meaning, so Gambara’s poetry spreads Petrarch’s authority even further afield. Echoes of political and theological contes¬ tation in its margins reproduce debates staged in the commentaries on the Rime sparse, but they also confer an authority upon the poet’s own voice. To a lesser extent than Colonna, Gambara explores the possibility of reworking grammatical rules, especially those of gender, in order to define her poetic voice. To a greater extent, however, she confronts divergent ways of thinking on their own terms in order to assess their usefulness for her rule. Changing one’s language is part of the process of changing the way one thinks, but one usually changes the latter in order to adapt to a sometimes painful experience. In the case of Gam¬ bara, a member of the governing elite in the turbulent sixteenth century, it is a form of evolutionary adjustment, a struggle with the environment in which she clarifies the genus, the genre, the kind of rule that best defines her own interests and repositions them among the interests of her class.

1 46

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara epitomize the responses of highborn women to Petrarch’s authority in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a time of linguistic redefinition prescribed on Pe¬ trarch’s model and also of religious and doctrinal fomentation and social upheaval. Their poetry inscribes many of these concerns concurrently promoted in commentaries on the Rime sparse. Their poetry also deals with representations of women’s experience, though in issues specific to the ruling class. An aristocratic provenance governs Colonna’s and Gambara’s gender revisions of Petrarchan topoi and tropes. For a broader range of social issues in Italy, one could turn to texts by such middleclass or upper-middle-class women as Gaspara Stampa and Tullia d Ar¬ agona. At the same time, a middle-class reading public for Petrarchan poetry was growing in urban centers outside of Italy, and it offers pow¬ erful examples of gender revisions by talented women who transposed Petrarchan forms into different languages. The poetry of Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé in mid-century Lyon exemplifies this new de¬ velopment.

Pernette du Guillet and the Ladies of Lyon The poetry of Pernette du Guillet (i520?~45) appeared in print on 14 August 1545 with the authority of a male editor, Antoine du Moulin, the publisher of Bonaventure des Périers and Clément Marot. Du Mou¬ ld’s preface addressed “Aux Dames Lyonnoizes” explains the circum¬ stances of his bringing du Guillet’s Rymes into print. A year earlier the press of Sulpice Sabon published Maurice Scève’s Dèlie (1544), after its author had acquired a notable reputation as an accomplished Latinist; as the author of La déplourable fin de Flamecte (1535)’ an adaptation of Juan de Flores’s response to Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta; as a contributor to Les blasons (1536), for which his composition on

Le

sourcil” ‘The Eyebrow’ won first prize in a poetic competition sponsored by Clément Marot; and as a contributor to La fleur de la poesie francoyse (1542). Scève and du Guillet had shared literary contacts since the spring of 1536 when they met and exchanged their poetry. This exchange evidently continued until 17 July 1545, when du Guillet died of unidentified causes.26 As du Moulin explained in his preface, he has assembled her poems and published them upon “les instantes, et affectionnées remonstrances de son dolent mary’’ ‘her grieving husband s

26Verdun L. Saulnier, “Etudes sur Pernette du Guillet et ses Rymes," Biblioth'eque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 4 (1944): 7-119, pp. 20-57.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

1

47

urgent and impassioned remonstrations’ (1). Du Moulin’s motives for publication may replicate those of the Italian editors who printed Colonna’s sonnets in homage to her as a patron and associate of other poets, or who anthologized Gambara’s poetry in patriotic recognition of her contribution to local culture, but they may also include the recog¬ nition of a good commercial opportunity in mercantile Lyon. The city was nothing if not the center of a thriving bourgeois culture. Du Guillet’s audience evidently included personal acquaintances who heard her perform her poetry at private gatherings during the preceding decade: “Les vous avons icy, quasi cornine pour copie, mis en evidence, tant pour satisfaire à ceulx, à qui privément en maintes bonnes compaignies elle les recitoit à propos, comme la plus part faictz à leur oc¬ casion” ‘Her husband and I have made available her writing for you, as though in a reproduction, as much to gratify those to whom she recited them privately at many pleasant gatherings, as most of them were com¬ posed for such occasions’ (3). Her editor nonetheless cast a wider and more ambitious net. The women whom he addressed were du Guillet’s social, cultural, and intellectual equals, ‘‘marrie de soy-mesmes du trespas de celle vertueuse, gentile, et toute spirituelle Dame” ‘grieved by the death of this virtuous, gentle, high-spirited lady’ and moved by ‘Tinclination, laquelle naturellement nous auons à nos semblables” ’the inclination that we naturally have toward those like us’ (1). Sharing du Guillet’s access to upper-middle-class resources, these women no doubt shared some of her skills in language, literature, and music. Du Moulin refered explicitly to the poet’s musical talent, ‘‘si parfaitement asseurée en tous instrumenz musiquaulx, soit au Luth, Espinette, et autres, lesquelz de soy requierent une bien longue vie à se y rendre parfaictz” ‘so fully proficient in all musical instruments, namely the lute, the spinet, and others that by themselves require a long lifetime of study,’ and to her literary pursuits, ‘‘à si bien dispencer le reste de ses bonnes heures, qu’elle l’aye employé à toutes bonnes lettres” ‘to manage the rest of her time so well that she devoted it to all literary pursuits’ (2).27 He refered also to her knowledge of Tuscan, Castilian, Latin, and elementary Greek. The sum of these attainments points to a cultured way of life among the high bourgeoisie and lesser nobility in sixteenth-century Lyon. As a center of international business and finance sponsored by the French monarchy, Lyon was famous for its promiscuous relations with Italian culture. At the crossroads of travel between Italy, France, Bavaria,

27See Marcel Tetel, “Le luth et la lyre de Fècole lyonnaise” in II Rinascimento a Lione, ed. Antonio Passenti and Giulia Mastrangelo (Rome: Edizioni dell’Atteneo, 1988), pp. 95162.

148

AUTHORIZING PETRARCH

and the northern German states, and rivalling Paris as a cultural capital, it attracted a large population of Italian merchants, bankers, lawyers, and other purveyors of commerce.28 So large was its Italian population that in the 1540s Lyon supported several printing presses just for its foreign readership. In 1545 Jean de Tournes issued the first edition of the Rime sparse published outside of Italy and in 1550 the expatriate Florentine Guglielmo Rovillio printed his edition of it with the commentary of An¬ tonio Brucioli. Du Moulin’s appeal to the “Dames Lyonnoizes” grows out of a serious concern to advertise the political autonomy and cultural prestige of Lyon. The gendering of pronouns in his preface itself galvanizes du Mou¬ lin’s civic project. The point at which the editor distinguishes the vous of his audience—the wealthy ladies of Lyon—from the collective nous the men and women of all classes who comprise the totality of that city— complicates his purpose. Du Moulin explicitly addresses these privileged ladies when he laments du Guillet’s death,

quand les Cieux nous en-

viantz tel heur la nous ravirent, 0 Dames Lyonnoizes, pour vous laisser achever ce qu elle avoit si heureusement commencé

when the heavens,

envying us such happiness, took her from us, O Lyonnais ladies, to leave you to accomplish what she had so propitiously begun’ (2). The editor excludes himself and other male members of his audience when he as¬ sociates the “Dames Lyonnoizes’’ with the poet in a second-person plu¬ ral, a vous that encompasses all women of achievement in Lyon whose remembrance (“la memoire de vous,’’ with vous as objective genitive) testifies to that city’s cultural distinction (“la memoire de vous,’’ with vous as subjective genitive): “Vous la puissiez si glorieusement ensuyvre, que la memoire de vous puisse testifier à la Posterité de la docilité et vivacité des bons espritz, qu’en tous artz ce Climat Lyonnois a tousjours produict en tous sexes’’ ‘You could follow her in such glory that the memory of you would bear witness to posterity of the quick judgment and liveliness of mind that in all the arts this Lyonnais clime has always generated in both sexes’ (3). Du Moulin is encouraging the ladies of Lyon to regroup and recall, cultivate and display their own cultural achievements, but he is doing so according to a political agenda spurring and spurred by bourgeois male rivalries. These rivalries evoke a spirit of competition in which many learned

28For Lyon’s sixteenth-century Italianate culture, see Franco Simone, The French Renais¬ sance, trans. H. Gaston Hall (London: Macmillan, 1969); for Lyon’s rivalry with Paris in the royal entry at Lyon in September, 1548, see Frederic Baumgartner, Henry II, King of France, 1547-1559 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 92-94.

AUTHORIZING GENDER REVISIONS

l49

Italian women—Colonna and Gambara stand out—have surpassed their male counterparts in France. Men on this side of the Alps need to eclipse not only the male humanists of Italy, but the female ones as well, and also to spur their women to do so. For Lyon to rise to the stature of Italy, its ladies must emulate the women of Italy. Du Guillet’s achieve¬ ment ought to inspire her Lyonnais sisters “pour participer de ce grand et immortel los, que les Dames d’Italie se sont aujourd’huy acquis, et tellement, que par leurs divins escrits elles ternissent le lustre de maints hommes doctes” ‘to share in this great and immortal praise that the ladies of Italy have today earned for themselves and to such an extent that by their divine writings they tarnish the luster of many learned males’ (3-4). Du Moulin’s metaphor of tarnished or diminished male luster oddly betrays his purpose. It logically implies that Lyon’s women should try to outshine the work of their fathers, brothers, and husbands at home as well as of Italian men abroad, inadvertently sanctioning a literary war between the sexes. Not the least negative consequence is its repression of any particular contribution that women’s literature could make. Du Moulin is enlisting Lyon’s women to assault the hegemony of Italian humanism, but only by valorizing a masculinist conception of appropriate literary topics and materials. In his utopian vision, women of learning, skill, and artistic talent may exalt the civic pride of Lyon in terms set forth by men, but not necessarily in terms responsive to female experience. When he pres¬ ents du Guillet’s poetry, he is advertising the cultural achievement of Lyon in terms of masculine priorities. His proposition manages to po¬ larize and politicize masculine and feminine talents rather than to equil¬ ibrate them. The editor has misunderstood du Guillet’s project. Du Guillet’s project is to fashion a position representative of and for women in love. It draws the masculinist consequences of a Petrarchan and Neoplatonic love ethos to their utmost logical limit and in the proc¬ ess it upsets many a literary cliché about the lover’s devotion to his be¬ loved and the tyranny that she exerts over him.29 Du Guillet will not exercise tyranny over her beloved, nor will he attempt mastery over her. They will be equals in a reciprocal relationship. Sometimes this equality entails on her part a startling recognition of her own sexuality. In epi2

160-63,

189

93 Lanham, Richard, 261/2

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 58, 87, 112

Laqueur, Thomas, 1211/12

Maclean, Ian, 1211/12, 1301/16

Latin language, 12, 18, 20, 84-86, 91-95,

Magny, Olivier de, 160, 166-68 Male dependence, v, 151, 192-93, 202-3,

102, 104, 110, 189-93 Laurette de Sade, 13, 48-50, 55, 61, 6667, 70-71, 152, 212-13 Lexical wordplay, 6-8, 12, 14-16, 21-22,

215, 267-72 Mandrou, Robert, 321/21 Mann, Nicholas, 111/6, 391/35

57-58, 65-66, 78; in Bembo, 84-85,

Manutius, Aldus, 10,43, 51,80, 84, 85-86

90-91, 97, 102, 106-8; in Colonna,

Marot, Clément, 3, 73, 115, 146, 155,

126-27; in du Guillet, 150, 153; in Gambara, 142-43; in Labé, 172-74, 185, 188; in Spenser, 191, 202, 223,

Marriage, 5, 24, 40, 72, 123, 130-31; in du Guillet, 151; in Gambara, 134, 137, 146; in Labé, 160, 163, 180—82;

262, 267, 274

in Spenser, 198-99, 209, 219-20,

Libraries, 32, 34-35 Literacy, 21-22, 27-28, 31-32,

160, 227, 230-31

33-35,

83,

222, 255-60, 270, 275, 276-79

87-88, 190-91, 193-94, 201, 209,

Martin, Henri-Jean, 351/29

236, 240-41

Martinez, Roland, 161/9

Literary allusions, 7, 8, 10, 13-14, 16-17,

Martz, Louis, 2361/31, 2451/38

19-22, 53-55, 64, 79, 80; in Bembo,

Masculine rivalry, 155-56, 163-65, 222

110; in Colonna, 122, 125, 127; in

Masculine virtue, 123, 131, 149, 163-64,

du Guillet, 153, 155; in Gambara,

222

136, 141; in Labé, 179, 190; in

Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, 1791/55

Spenser, 202-3, 224, 235, 237-38,

Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 31/2, 211/12, 291/9,

258, 269, 276 Literary authority, ix, 1-3, 16-18, 20-24,

2691/52 Medici family: Giovanni (Pope Leo X),

25-28, 41, 54, 57, 64, 76, 282-83; in

82, 83, 87, 135; Giuliano, 83, 88-89,

Bembo, 83-84, 100-2; in Colonna,

92-94, 111-13; Giulio (Pope

134; in du Guillet, 154-55; in Labé,

Clement VII), 70, 83, 88, 113, 119;

165, 189-90; in Spenser, 199-200,

Lorenzo, 42, 83, 84, 113

218, 235-36, 239-40, 258, 266, 279 Literary models, 17, 19-21, 42, 54, 59,

Medusa, 10, 103-4, 108-9, 137* 194> 279 Metonymy, 89, 124, 125, 154, 214

67, 77-78; in Bembo, 89-90, 98-

Migiel, Marilyn, 1181/8, 1811/56, 2421/35

104, 106-7, 11Q; in Colonna, 131; in

Milan, 37-39, 41-43

du Guillet, 154-56; in Labé, 169-70,

Minnis, A.J., 281/8, 291/10

171, 184, 190, 192; in Spenser, 202,

Minturno, Antonio Sebastiano, 55, 56—59,

204, 212, 227-28, 230, 236, 240-41, 247> 257. 273, 279 Literary references, 16—17, 21-22, 59, 64, 66-67, 77

117 Mirollo, James, 1051/13, 1791/55 Modena, 74, 76, 140-41 Murrin, Michael, 1991/7

INDEX

299

Naples, 52-58, 114, 117

270-72; sonnet 197, 103; sonnet

Narcissus, 238-39, 267-72

208, 153; sonnet 212, 14-17; sonnet

Narrative, 2, 29-30, 47-51, 58, 61-62,

215, 212-13; sonnet 216, 171-72;

132; in du Guillet, 150-51, 154; in

sonnet 248, 232-33; sonnet 250,

Labé, 169-70; in Spenser, 196-97,

245; sonnet 256, 176-77; sonnet

199, 207-9, 222, 228, 242-44, 261-

275, 125-27; sonnet 292, 13; sonnet

62, 264-67, 272-73, 275-76

3°3> 98-99; sonnet 304, 99-101;

Nash, Jerry, 179*155

sonnet 310, 179-84; sonnet 311,

Navarrete, Ignacio, 115m

122-24; sonnet 345, 127-29; sonnet

Nelson, Lowry, 22*113, 254*142

346, 79, 141-43; sonnet 353, 273-

Nicholas of Lyre, 28

75; sonnet 354, 11-13; sonnet 355,

Nichols, Fred, 190*164

11; sonnet 357, 11

Noakes, Susan, 29*110, 34*126

Secretum, 13

Numerology, 20, 29, 244-45

Seniles, 17, 18, 114 Trionfi, 16, 214

Occulta virtù, 96-97

Plato, 53, 60, 63, 64; Cratylus, 18; and

Ochino, Bernardino, 120, 251

Neoplatonism, 107, 112-13, 130,

Ong, Walter, 26*12

151, 158, 174; Republic, 121-22;

Oram, William, 198, 216*113, 293

Symposium, 10, 271

Orpheus, 277 Orsilago di Pisa, 226-27 Ovid, 6, 26, 54-55, 67, 156-57, 162, 169-70, 180-81, 269*152

Prescott, Anne Lake, 232*127, 238*132, 259*144, 259*145, 261*146 Procne and Philomena, 179-82 Propertius, 8, 67

Oxymoron, 21

Provencal poetry, 6-8, 13, 16, 18, 21-22,

Paris, Gaston, 204*110

Puttenham, George, ix, 22*115, 264-

84, 92, 109, 204

Parker, Deborah, 29*19, 32*119, 46*146,

66

63w55 Paronomasia, 14, 103, 126-27, 159; in

Quilligan, Maureen, 198*17

Labé, 174-78, 186, 191-92; in

Quint, David, 216*115

Spenser, 198, 202, 214, 223, 239,

Quitslund, Jon, 55*152

243, 252, 264, 274 Patterson, Annabel, 26*16, 219*115

Rabil, Albert, 26*11

Patterson, Lee, 195*11, 228*120

Raimondi, Ezio, 42*138, 63*155, 78*164

Petrarch:

Ralegh, Sir Walter, 196, 216-17, 223,

Africa, 38, 42, 43, 203 Familiares, 13, 17, 29, 71, 77 Rime sparse: canzone 23, 105, 156-59;

235 Rebhorn, Wayne, 88*18 Reformation, 3, 21, 33-34, 68-69, 72-73,

canzone 126, 156-57; canzone 127,

75> 79-8o; in Colonna, 119-21, 130;

31; canzone 128, 48, 51, 59, 136-37;

in Gambara, 139-40, 144; in

canzone 323, 227, 230-31; canzone

Spenser, 200, 219-20, 243, 245-53,

366, 108, 219, 247-50, 273; sestina

254-55’ 259-62

332, 277; sonnet 1, 97; sonnet 2,

Renée of France, 3, 73-74

207-9; sonnet 3, 169-70, 207-8;

Rhetoric, 15, 52, 57~59’ 64-65, 76; in

sonnet 12, 109; sonnet 15, 173-74;

Bembo, 96, 104-5; in Colonna, 118,

sonnet 20, 202-3; sonnet 21, 204-6;

125-26; in du Guillet, 150; in Labé,

sonnets 27-28, 48, 68; sonnet 35,

185-86; in Spenser, 201, 213, 236,

184-88, 237-38; sonnet 45, 238-39, 268-70; sonnet 62, 19-21; sonnet

239’ 252 Rhetorical culture, 4, 26-27, 79, 187

65, 169-71; sonnet 74, 111; sonnet

Rhyme, 7, 13, 97, 125; in du Guillet,

132, 228; sonnet 133, 65; sonnets

i53, 159; in Labé, 177-78, 183; in

136-38, 51, 68, 74-75; sonnet 140,

Spenser, 196, 203, 231-33, 260, 263,

5-11; sonnet 153, 138-39; sonnet 159, 183; sonnet 180, 105; sonnet

274 Rigolot, Francois, 68*156, 152*133,

189, 131-33, 220-21, 223-30, 253;

160*139, 166*146, 170*148, 189*161,

sonnet 190, 257-60; sonnet 193,

190*163

INDEX

3°° Roche, Thomas P., Jr., 3712, 6773, 207711, 347728, 116774, 200776, 2407734, 2447737, 2767755 Rome, 14, 90 Rovillio, Guglielmo, 3, 33, 74, 80, 148, 160

256-61; sonnet 68, 206, 242, 26162; sonnet 69, 262-63; sonnet 70, 263-64; sonnet 74, 196, 199; sonnet 75, 214; sonnets 76-77, 264; sonnet 80, 196, 214-15; sonnet 81, 221; sonnet 82, 270; sonnet 83, 266-73; sonnet 84, 270, 273; sonnet 85, 270;

Sacrament, 219 Salutati, Coluccio, 36 Santagata, Marco, 7775, 11776 Scaglione, Aldo D., 967710, 1897762, 2047710 Scève, Maurice, 115, 146, 150-56, 16061, 163; Dèlie, dizain 417, 152-54 Schiesari, Juliana, 117777, 1817756 Scripture, books of: 1 Corinthians, 246,

sonnet 86-88, 266, 273; sonnet 89, 273-76

Anacreontics, 272-73, 275-76 Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 201, 214, 218, 222

Complaints, 230-33, 235 Epithalamion, 218, 221, 223, 275-79 Faerie Queene: dedicatory poems, 196; book 1.10, 251-52; book 2, 216;

252, 261; 2 Corinthians, 245-46;

book 3.4, 229-30; book 3.6, 256;

Ephesians, 219, 246, 261; Hebrews,

book 3.11-12, 198, 239—40; book

142-43; John, 123, 261-62; Matthew,

4.proem, 198; book 4.7, 216; book

19-20; 1 Peter, 246; Proverbs, 259,

4.10, 256; book 5.9, 215; book 6.9,

131-32; Psalms, 28, 68, 73, 79, 123, !32-33, 220, 230, 259, 261;

236; book 6.10, 217 Spenser, Elizabeth, 197-98, 214-16, 270

Revelation, 75, 250, 261, 278-79;

Speroni, Sperone, 97

Romans, 246, 248-50; Song of

Squarzafico, Hieronimo: career, 43-44;

Songs, 79, 254-56, 263 Segre, Cesare, 13778 Sequence: in Petrarch, 5, 11, 29, 51, 58-

general interpretation, 2, 4, 37, 80, 194, 282; specific commentaries, 9, 46, 47, 229, 249

59, 61-62; in Spenser, 196, 199, 206,

Stil canuto, 100-2, 104-5

222, 244, 252, 262, 266-67, 272

Stone, Donald, Jr., 1572237, 1657244

Sidney, Philip, 35, 51, 195, 198, 227, 273 Silberman, Lauren, 2307722

Strozzi, Ercole, 88-89, 91, 95-96, 98, 102

Simone, Franco, 1487728

Sturm-Maddox, Sarah, 13228

Smarr, Janet, 2277719

Suitner, Franco, 16229

Smith, Thomas, 197

Suzuki, Mihoko, 2462239

Sonnet sequences, 5, 51, 115, 195, 199,

Sylvano da Venafro: career, 52-56;

227, 231-34, 273, 280 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 24, 52, 195-280, 283

Amoretti: sonnet 3, 201-3; sonnet 4,

general interpretation, 2, 4, 47, 80, 194, 282; specific commentaries, 9, 67, 101, 129, 157, 172, 179-80, 187, 207-9, 224-25, 227, 237, 249

206; sonnet 10, 203; sonnet 11, 2034; sonnet 12, 206-9; sonnet 13, 210-

Tasso, Torquato, 241-44

14; sonnet 14, 204; sonnet 15, 278;

Teskey, Gordon, 2192215

sonnet 18, 236; sonnet 21, 236;

Tetel, Marcel, 1472227

sonnet 22, 206, 236-38, 241, 242;

Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 12

sonnet 23, 221; sonnet 33, 196, 199;

Tottel, Richard, 196, 233-34

sonnet 34, 221-27, 253; sonnet 35,

Translatio studii, 114-15

266-70; sonnet 38, 221; sonnet 44,

Trissino, Giangiorgio, 97, 118, 131

221; sonnet 45, 238-39; sonnet 46,

Trovato, Paolo, 16229

221; sonnet 48, 240-41; sonnet 54,

Tuscan language, 6-7, 84-85, 87-89, 92-

241-44; sonnet 55, 244; sonnet 56,

93

221, 244; sonnet 57, 244; sonnet 58, 244-47, 250-53; sonnet 59, 221,

Urbino, 82-83, 105, 113

244-45, 247-53; sonnet 60, 197; sonnet 61, 200; sonnet 62, 206;

Valdés, Juan de, 120, 130

sonnet 63, 221; sonnet 64, 254;

Van der Noot, Jan, 196, 227, 230-31, 235

sonnet 65, 222, 255-56; sonnet 67,

Varrò, 18-19

INDEX

Vasari, Giorgio, 106 Vat. Lat. 3195, 11, 29, 46, 62, 85, 207m 1, 273 Vellutello, Alessandro: career, 45-52;

301

Visconti, dukes of Milan, 2, 32, 37, 39, 40-42, 70, 136 Voice, 59, 135, 244-48, 283 Volosinov, V. N., 27/14

general interpretation, 2, 4, 53, 54, 55, 67, 70, 80, 194, 282; specific commentaries, 9, 61, 127-28, 136,

141, 154, 157-58’ 169, 174, 176, 186, 208-9, 212-13, 224, 227, 249, 270, 274, 285-88 Venice, 45-46, 63, 72-73, 82, 84,

89

Warkentin, Germaine, 16/17, 35w3°> 196/13, 262/148 Weinberg, Bernard, 57/153, 63/155, 77/163 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 28/17, 228/120 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 11/17, 38/134 Witt, Ronald, 36/131

Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 43-44

Wofford, Susanne, 230/123, 239/133

Vickers, Nancy, 117/17

Wyatt, Thomas, 51, 115, 195, 228-29,

Virgil, 12, 25, 28, 46, 63, 85-86, 104,

233-35

141, 202-3; Aeneid 2.144, 20-21;

Georgies, 94-95, 180-81

Zancan, Marina, 117/17, 140/125