Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy 9781442623019

Citation preview

SPEAKING SPIRITS Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy

This page intentionally left blank

SHERRY ROUSH

Speaking Spirits Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-5040-4 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Roush, Sherry, author Speaking spirits : ventriloquizing the dead in Renaissance Italy / Sherry Roush. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-5040-4 (bound) 1. Italian literature – To 1400 – History and criticism. 2. Italian literature – 16th century – History and criticism. 3. Ghosts in literature. 4. Dead in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Italian studies PQ4075.R68 2015

850.9′375

C2015-900850-6

This book has been published with the assistance of The College of the Liberal Arts and the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at The Pennsylvania State University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction. Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

3

1 Rewriting the Auctor: Revising according to the Text’s Letter or Spirit? 36 2 Divining Dante: Scandals of His Corpus and Corpse 3 Genius Loci: Exile, Citizenship, and the Place of Burial

69 108

4 Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum: Some Not-So-Final Thoughts Notes

165

Bibliography Index

253

225

138

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This study began more than a decade ago as an examination of Italian Renaissance ghost stories. Why did Italian storytellers relate tales of ghosts that were not scary and seemed more pedagogical than entertaining? Why were Renaissance examples so different from classical and medieval ghost story precedents? Why did the framing of Renaissance ghost stories seek to maintain narrative distance between the ghost and the audience in striking contrast to many modern and contemporary tales? It took me far too much time to realize that I was less interested in defining “scary” or providing a history of ghosts than I was in exploring the power of the message attributed to a fictive spirit, the power of rhetoric. Strategies for establishing auctoritas and for authorizing particular readings of a text – strategies at the heart of my previous study, Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) – return in this one. I remain interested in the ways in which authors use their fictions as rhetorical tools of power and persuasion. In Hermes’ Lyre, I argued that the commentaries that poets penned to explicate their own compositions marked an acknowledgment of their inability to possess the totalizing significance of their poems. In the present study, I argue that authors who invent and present instances of eidolopoeia claim more – rather than less – authority for their messages by feigning that such messages come from esteemed spirits beyond the grave. Because this book had two very different incarnations, I have a great many colleagues, friends, and institutions to thank not only for their assistance and encouragement, but also for their patience. It was a singular privilege and delight for me to have been able to work on Hermes’ Lyre and on this project in its early stages under the wise and generous

viii Acknowledgments

editorship of the late Ron Schoeffel at the University of Toronto Press. Without the continued guidance of Executive Editor Suzanne Rancourt and her amazing editorial staff at the Press, this project would not be. I offer special thanks to copyeditor Judy Williams for her meticulous insight and warm professionalism. Two anonymous readers chosen by the Press provided welcome divergent perspectives on my book drafts. I appreciate their suggestions for improving the manuscript and acknowledge that I alone am responsible for any shortcomings that remain. The Pennsylvania State University has been very generous in granting me two research sabbaticals during the 2006–7 and 2013–14 academic years. I am grateful to Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities for a fall 2004 Resident Scholar Fellowship, which allowed me to draft part of the fourth chapter, and for their spring 2007 Individual Faculty Research Grant, which enabled necessary contextual research at the Harvard and Stanford university libraries. I thank the Bogliasco Foundation and its Centro Studi Ligure for a fall 2006 residency, providing the perfect situation in which to complete much of the drafting of the initial manuscript. Proofreading and editing assistance at the earliest stage was provided by Josephine M. Carubia of Metaphorical Ink. My special thanks also go to the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria College of the University of Toronto for a Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship, and to the William and Katherine Devers fund in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame for funding for travel to their libraries, where I read with great delight the nineteenth-century stories featuring Dante’s spirit. Sandra Steltz, Rare Books Librarian at Penn State University, was a tremendous help in acquiring some of the authorial ghost stories and eidolopoetic narratives on which I have spent the most time and energy. In addition to invited lectures at the University of Notre Dame in 2001, at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at SUNYBinghamton in 2006, and at Rutgers University and Bowdoin College in 2014, I presented research pertaining to different authorial ghosts at six conferences: the Modern Language Association conventions in 2000 and 2011, the American Association of Italian Studies conferences in 2003, 2005, and 2013, and the Northern California Renaissance conference in 2007. Discussions following those presentations, as well as with colleagues at Penn State and elsewhere, have helped to make this project better. I thank Olga Zorzi Pugliese, Theodore Cachey, Jr, Lorenzo Polizzotto, William Kennedy, Warren Ginzburg, Christopher Nissen, Alfred

Acknowledgments ix

Triolo, Robert R. Edwards, William R. Blue, Maria Truglio, Nicholàs Fernández-Medina, Chiara Nardone, Johanna Rossi Wagner, Stephen Wheeler, Arielle Saiber, Fiona Stewart, Brenda Smith, and the members of the State College Lit Club. I hope to live up to “The Dantisti” – John W. Moore, Jr, and the late John Buck – great humanists both. Portions of the second and third chapters were published in earlier elaborations as two articles: “Dante as Piagnone Prophet: Girolamo Benivieni’s ‘Cantico in Laude di Dante’ (1506)” in Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 49–80; and “Dante Ravennate and Boccaccio Ferrarese? PostMortem Residency and the Attack on Florentine Literary Hegemony, 1480–1520,” in Viator 35 (2004): 543–62. I gratefully acknowledge the journal editors’ permission to reprint. To my husband, Rick Weyer, I offer my deepest appreciation for his unwavering love and support. This marathon is done.

This page intentionally left blank

SPEAKING SPIRITS Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

“ché ’n la mente m’è fitta, e or m’accora, la cara e buona immagine paterna di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna.” “for in my memory is fixed, and now it weighs on my heart, the dear, kind paternal image of you when, in the world, from time to time you used to teach me how man makes himself eternal.” – Dante’s words to his teacher of rhetoric “Brunetto Latini,” Inferno 15.82–51

Eidolopoeia is the rhetorical figure by which the dead are made to speak. By means of eidolopoeia, an orator or author feigns conversing with the spirit of a historical person and quoting directly the words of the interlocutor from beyond the grave. Authors who speak for the dead do not limit themselves to any particular genres or modes of literary expression, figuring speaking spirits in ghost stories, journeys to the other world, and dream visions, as well as apologie, diaries, epistles, lyric poems featuring voices of the dead, and more. In the present study I contextualize various examples of two types of eidolopoetic texts in order to understand the authorial motivations for their composition, as well as the consequences of their use by Italian writers primarily in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Since eidolopoeia, as a rhetorical figure, concerns itself particularly with the power of persuasion, I focus my selection of eidolopoetic examples on those that seek to sway

4

Speaking Spirits

opinion for two main purposes: (1) to establish authoritative versions of texts; and (2) to prompt action in the “real” world, particularly in the legal and political spheres of public life. In the first instance, fictional personas of dead authors are figured typically in proems or prefaces of reissued works in order to endorse a new translation, emended edition, or updated version of the original literary project. While they may rely on a formulaic quality of the figure to acknowledge a literary borrowing or to pay homage to an esteemed authorial predecessor, there are some eidolopoetic narratives that radically subvert the original work, making it seem as if the deceased authors were offering palinodes of their poetic masterpieces. Among the examples of the second type of eidolopoeia examined in this study are speaking spirits figured to influence diplomatic or judicial outcomes. Sometimes eidolopoetic fictions appear surprisingly efficacious in compelling those in positions of power to change course, to reverse legal sentences (such as banishment decrees), or to go against the legally declared final wishes of some famous and otherwise influential people (including Petrarch and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola). By means of close readings of eidolopoetic texts and their contextualization (in terms of historical and biographical data and reception theories), I aim to illuminate latent ethical and existential dimensions that this very common but understudied form of literary characterization can offer. Classical rhetoricians, including Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100), defined eidolopoeia in relation to and typically as a subcategory of prosopopoeia (personification). Echoing Cicero (106 BC–43 BC), Quintilian in the ninth book of his Institutio oratoria (The Orator’s Education) stated of prosopopoeia: His et adversariorum cogitationes velut secum loquentium protrahimus (qui tamen ita demum a fide non abhorrent si ea locutos finxerimus quae cogitasse eos non sit absurdum), et nostros cum aliis sermones et aliorum inter se credibiliter introducimus, et suadendo, obiurgando, querendo, laudando, miserando personas idoneas damus. Quin deducere deos in hoc genere dicendi et inferos excitare concessum est. These [personifications] both vary and animate a speech to a remarkable degree. We use them (1) to display the inner thoughts of our opponents as though they were talking to themselves (but they are credible only if we imagine them saying what it is not absurd for them to have thought!),

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

5

(2) to introduce conversations between ourselves and others, or of others among themselves, in a credible manner, and (3) to provide appropriate characters for words of advice, reproach, complaint, praise, or pity. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.2

Quintilian’s insistence on the credibility of the representation based on its verisimilitude accords with other theorists’ approximation of eidolopoeia to ethopoeia (“sermocinatio,” or impersonation). Priscian in Praeexercitamina, a sixth-century Latin translation of a previous Greek work by Hermogenes, noted two variations of “the imitation of speech accommodated to suit assigned persons and situations”: (1) “prosopopoeia or personification proper, ‘when speech is simulated contra naturam,’ and (2) eidolopoeia, ‘when words are put into the mouths of the dead.’”3 Eidolopoeia has been termed “ghost-making,”4 although it is more precisely idol making, from its Greek etymological root eidolon. Many connotations of “idol” exist. An idol is not a true person, but rather inherently deceives, and depends absolutely on its close resemblance – to the point of confusion – to the original it seeks to represent or perhaps even to supplant. A fraud, counterfeit, or simulacrum, the dead spirit in literary eidolopoeia becomes a mouthpiece, a kind of puppet, through which its author-creator ventriloquizes a message. Thus the idol speaks without independent personal agency or will; if it acts or communicates, it does because another compels it to do so. For all of the undeniably negative connotations concerning idols, some positive ones emerge as well. The term “idol” can be applied to a special person recognized as an object of great admiration and potential emulation, a paragon of performance, virtue, prowess, or other highly revered quality. Authors of eidolopoeia frequently choose as their interlocutors the spirits of their idols – their most esteemed predecessors. While some writers may cast a famous predecessor in a less flattering light as a spirit (and many of Dante’s infernal shades come to mind in this regard), nonetheless authors more typically speak for figures of the dead they view with respect. Even in the positive connotations of “idol,” however, the referent is entirely dependent on another. In other words, a human being can triumph in action, author a masterpiece, or live a most virtuous life, but that person still cannot assert or define him/herself as an “idol.” Exemplary people only become idols if others represent them as such.

6

Speaking Spirits

Rhetoricians referred to dead people as “perfect,” though not in accordance with the aforementioned positive connotations of “idol.” A dead individual was perfectus in the sense of being “in one’s final form,” thus “completed” or “entire.” The fiction that a person as a spirit continues to speak after death subverts fundamentally this assumption that at death a life and a person’s character are perfected. If historical people can be made to speak from the grave, potentially no limitations impede any living person from speaking for them or determining what the spirits can be made to say. In the process of interrogating the effects of eidolopoetic fictions in the world of the living, I also aim to illuminate dimensions of the definition and self-definition of personal agency and identity. Even some of the earliest writers in this study grappled with issues of poetic licence, personal fame, truth or accuracy, the foundations of scholarship, and/or what constitutes authorial inventiveness. For example, Giovanni Boccaccio in his Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Treatise in Praise of Dante) created a ghostly persona of his scholarly subject (Dante) in order to offer an answer to a vexing question: Did Dante-author complete the Divina commedia? After all, at Dante’s death, the final thirteen cantos of Paradiso were missing. In the very same Trattatello, however, Boccaccio insisted that a key motive for his efforts to collect and document Dante’s works was to ensure that “né alcuno delle sue s’intitolasse, né a lui fossero per avventura intitolate l’altrui” (“his works may not be attributed to someone else, and that the works of another may not be ascribed to him”).5 Along with Boccaccio, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti faced the seeming paradoxical uses of spirit narratives when he created a spirit of Guido Cavalcanti that spoke dismissively of spirit characters as reliable sources for literary research. Petrarch must also have intuited that after his death his works might require some form of authentication as a defence against others (including scribes, commentators, and editors) who might misrepresent his words. He adopted the notation, “Scripto ipsa manu decti Poete” (written in the hand of the aforesaid poet).6 Eidolopoetic narratives highlight the disparities or potential disparities in textual representations of the self.7 It thus comes as no surprise that a crucial aspect of this rhetorical figure concerns the directness of the speech attributed to the dead spirit. When an author quotes an idol, the message typically carries particular forcefulness. A brief comparison of two near-contemporary texts by Niccolò Machiavelli can serve to clarify this point. In a oft-cited letter

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

7

addressed to Francesco Vettori dated 10 December 1513, Machiavelli described the close of his daily routine in exile: Venuta la sera, mi ritorno in casa, ed entro nel mio scrittoio … entro nelle antique corti delli antiqui uomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amorevolmente, mi pasco di quel cibo, che solum è mio, e che io nacqui per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare con loro e domandarli della ragione delle loro azioni; e quelli per loro umanità mi rispondono. On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study … I enter the ancient courts of men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me.8

In speaking with the great historians, philosophers, and poets of the past, and listening to their answers, Machiavelli did not compose eidolopoeia, since he did not invent more words for them to utter in his own time and cultural context. He did not embellish here the speech of the dead, as he did in his Discorso o dialogo intorno alla lingua nostra (Debate or Dialogue concerning Our Language, c. 1515). In the Dialogo, Machiavelli represented a fictive spirit of Dante, which he compelled to recant a view that the historical Dante had pointedly presented in De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquent Vernacular, c. 1302–5). “Dante”’s dramatized capitulation to Machiavelli’s linguistic arguments – “Egli è il vero, e io ho il torto” (That is true, and I am mistaken)9 – conveyed a directness and an emotional urgency that I will argue in chapter 2 served Machiavelli’s purpose: to end his own state of exile by highlighting similarities between his situation and Dante’s and playing on Renaissance Florentines’ collective desire to make amends for Dante’s banishment. In sum, the first example described Machiavelli’s study and the reception of ideas from books; the second involved the poesis (or making) of an authorial idol through which Machiavelli sought to influence through literary rhetoric the actions of his contemporaries. Advantages of Eidolopoetic Protagonists What emerges in the consideration of the personas in literary texts are the unique advantages of eidolopoetic characters. Eidolopoetic characters have identities that readers already apprehend. The historical

8

Speaking Spirits

people whom authors represent lived and acquired the fame, reputation, experience, or status that accords with writerly intentions. Identity is crucial because it imparts a ready-made context for the author’s message, but also a foundational authority on which the eidolopoetic writer wishes to build. In the case of the Dialogo, for example, Machiavelli specifically chose “Dante” as his interlocutor because the greatly esteemed fellow Florentine author was also exiled for political reasons, and the lively linguistic debate could serve as a means for linking both men’s fates in the minds of Machiavelli’s readers. Almost invariably the first thing that the reader of eidolopoeia learns about a spirit is its name or identifying attributes. Upon catching sight of the shade of Virgil in the first canto of Inferno, the character of the pilgrim Dante pleads, “Miserere di me … /qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!” (“Miserere [have mercy] on me … whatever you may be, whether shade or true man!”). The spirit immediately proceeds to acknowledge its post-mortem state and to identify itself with the Lombard poet who under Augustus in Rome wrote the epic poem about Aeneas’s flight from Troy. Dante the pilgrim calls him “Virgilio” (Virgil) at Inferno 1.78, and “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore” (“my master and my author”) at Inferno 1.85, and the spirit’s identity, here and in other examples of eidolopoeia, will closely correspond to the message that the author wishes to convey. Moreover, the historical people represented by these eidolopoetic characters are dead, emphatically dead, a key characteristic for a number of reasons. First of all, the characters are figured as possessing not only the status and experiences earned during life, but also a special knowledge, unavailable to the living, of what happens to human beings after physical death. Moreover, the comprehensive nature of these characters’ perceived experience lends to their messages an almost unquestionable quality. Second, the deceased nature of the historical people on whom these characters are based means that the dead cannot object if the words placed in their mouths are not their own. If these figures represented living people, as in some Renaissance dialogues for instance, the people being represented might object to how they are portrayed or might dispute opinions attributed to their fictional personas.10 The dead have no power to critique their fictitious portrayals. Finally, the eidolopoetic characters’ “deadness” accords the storyteller a unique role: that of the privileged intermediary between the living readership and the dead protagonist. Like a medium, the eidolopoetic author seizes the prerogative of interpreting or relating the dead spirit’s message. The fiction writer’s claim

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

9

to have communicated with a dead person suggests that the claimant possesses a power that the reader does not have: clairvoyance or a sixth sense. Those who assert the capacity to communicate with spirits have an advantage over sceptics; within the economy of eidolopoeia, the non-believer in ghosts or the speaking dead assumes a less competent status. In most examples of Renaissance Italian eidolopoeia, the author represents himself as an eponymous character within the narrative functioning as the intermediary. The role of percipient of the ghostly spirit in these cases coincides with the narrator, and the author of eidolopoeia serves as mediator between the fictive realm of the dead and his audience of readers in the realm of the living. The construction of the narrator-character entails necessarily that the author fabricates or fictitiously represents more than just the traits of the spirit. According to arguments familiar from narratology, each author’s projection of a narrative persona called by his name is not him, but a fictional representation of him, and the fictional representation can be embellished to differing effects. For example, Boccaccio the narrator in De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Illustrious Men) will claim at the outset of the eighth book that he has grown weary of the task of recording the stories told by the file of illustrious dead souls parading through his study, and he labels himself as lazy, a quality that does not necessarily correlate with Boccaccio the author’s many textual contributions during this period of his life and historical circumstances. By contrast, Petrarch in his Africa fashions a poetic persona of himself named “Franciscus” that is praised in such exaggeratedly high terms by the spirits of Homer and Ennius that it strains credibility, since the young poet Petrarch in his inability to complete his projects could show little to substantiate these spirits’ exaltations of him, at least at the time of composition of the unfinished Latin epic poem. The messages that eidolopoetic characters are made to speak can also be especially controversial in nature. Among the Italian Renaissance examples in this study, eidolopoetic characters will articulate political views of a minority faction whose members feared persecution for political reasons; they will advocate actions contrary to legal precedent; or in some cases, they will be used to speak the unspeakable, that is, authors will use spirit characters to articulate some kind of taboo. In this regard, eidolopoeia, as a rhetorical figure, sometimes mentions what reticence ploys, ellipses, or other textual forms of

10

Speaking Spirits

“passing over in silence” might seek to leave unsaid. When such forthright speech comes from a character figured in the afterlife, instead of directly from the living author, it would seem that some degree of its ineffability is mitigated. Renaissance Italian eidolopoetic writers had a great many precedents for their projects in classical and medieval texts, as well as in the works of the Three Crowns. I turn now to consider some of them. Brief Survey of Classical/Medieval Eidolopoeia and Critical Approaches Classical examples of eidolopoeia, especially among Latin authors, served as models – either directly or indirectly – for early modern Italian writers. The number and variety of classical spirit narratives are notable: Lucan’s first book of the Pharsalia, Socrates’ animated corpse, Suetonius’s account of why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and Brutus’s evil genius in Plutarch’s Life of Brutus are just some of the better-known instances.11 Virgil’s Aeneid offered various speaking spirits, including those of Polydorus (in book 3), and of Palinurus, Deïphobus, and Anchises (in book 6). In the opening lines of the Annales by Ennius, words attributed to a spirit of Homer served at least in part as an instrument of poetic self-promotion for Ennius, a model that Petrarch will exploit. Explicitly political uses of eidolopoeia figure more insistently in the narratives of Roman public debates, and the ghosts conjured in Cicero’s orations leap immediately to mind. In these speeches, fictional spirits plead their causes: assassinated victims seek recompense and war heroes enjoin senators to honour them with fitting monuments for the sacrifice of their lives on behalf of the state. Moreover, Cicero’s examples serve as clear evidence of how eidolopoetic authors used the figure not only to advocate for third-party causes (i.e., on behalf of murder victims or war heroes), but also to their own authorial advantage. Basil Dufallo in The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to the Principate details how Cicero harnessed the power of public rumours to cast aspersions on his rivals from a rhetorical distance by articulating them through the spirits of respected Roman citizens.12 Dufallo intuited limiting the scope of his examination of spirits in Roman literature to the figure of prosopopoeia, as I have done even more restrictively to eidolopoeia. In doing so, he has greatly expanded scholarly understanding of the

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

11

sometimes ideological motivational scope of classical ghost stories.13 Dufallo summarized: Why do the dead in these texts act so much like the living? … we find dead ancestors reproaching their living descendants for aberrant sexual conduct, dead statesmen returning to take part in contemporary politics, dead wives and mistresses addressing courtroom-style speeches to their surviving partners. We cannot ascribe such scenarios simply to the Romans’ well-known obsession with ancestry and the emulation of illustrious Romans of the past, imitatio maiorum. Indeed, at issue here is not only imitation of ancestors but also something we might paradoxically term imitatio posteriorum: the dead’s “imitation of those who come after.” This peculiarly Roman fantasy never manifests itself to the same extent in later Latin literature and there is no precedent for it in Greek literature, where, conversely, the activities of the dead are usually imagined in far less elaborate terms.14

Although Dufallo’s study relied on modern performance theory, its conclusions, which explained the use of fictional ghostly spirits for political purposes during Rome’s transition from Republic to Principate, parallel some of mine. Nevertheless, I will argue that writers in the Italian Renaissance did indeed resurrect in later Latin literature, as well as in Italian vernacular literature, something of that “peculiarly Roman fantasy” he mentioned. In the intervening period of the Middle Ages, however, there did seem to be fewer instances of that kind of political-rhetorical use of eidolopoeia, despite the fact that there was a veritable proliferation of literary representations of the congress between the living and the dead, especially in ghost stories, dream visions, and journeys to the other world. Scholarly attention to medieval ghost stories, such as those edited by Andrew Joynes or analysed by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Patrick Geary, and Ronald C. Finucane, typically focused on issues related to what happens to the soul after death, oftentimes commenting explicitly or implicitly in Christian milieux on the nature of the relatively new concept of Purgatory.15 Medieval speaking spirits seem to have as their primary impetus to exhort their living percipients to lead a moral life, to believe in God, and to practise actions worthy of praise. Scholars have also explored the authorial messages contained in visions of the other world (see especially the study by Giorgio Fedalto and the volume edited by Maria Pia Ciccarese). Manuele Gragnolati’s Experiencing the

12

Speaking Spirits

Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture investigated embriological and eschatological aspects of defining human identity in Dante and some of his precedents, including Giacomino da Verona and Uguccione da Lodi (both active in the thirteenth century) and Bonvesin de la Riva (d. circa 1315).16 On visions in which a dreamer claims to receive a message from a spirit, Maria Ruvoldt has offered one of the few studies dedicated to Italian examples, though more scholars have studied the potentialities of prophecy and inspiration in the English dream vision tradition, including Constance B. Hieatt, Kathryn L. Lynch, J. Stephen Russell, and the contributors to the study edited by Peter Brown, Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Because of the eidolopoetic focus on what the historical dead are quoted as saying, it should be apparent that my study thus excludes ghost stories that feature legendary, mythical, or otherwise nonhistorical spirits17 or those that represent indeterminate malificia, such as devils.18 However, a very logical next step in the study of eidolopoeia would be the consideration of mystical and saintly visions. The Catholic Church repeatedly recognized human beings who during their lifetimes left behind narratives featuring communications with the dead, in addition to their legacies of a holy life, faith, good works, and miracles. These blessed and saintly individuals became very powerful esteemed examples of Christian life, whom the Church encouraged the living faithful to emulate and to seek in prayer. A plethora of late medieval and early modern Italian saints boast otherworldly encounters of various kinds during their lifetimes, usually in the form of visions or ecstasies, including – but certainly not limited to those of – Agnese di Montepulciano (d. 1317), Caterina da Siena (d. 1380), Francesco di Roma (d. 1440), Caterina di Genova (d. 1510), Caterina de’ Ricci (d. 1590), and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (d. 1606).19 Though I leave aside in this study explicitly religious visions, I will return in chapter 4 to consider the use of saintly spirits to articulate “prophecies” that more closely resemble recommendations for secular political action.20 I refer readers seeking a comparative critical-theoretical panorama of spirit narratives to Jürgen Pieters’s excellent study Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History. Some of the authors Pieters examined in his book overlap with mine (including Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli); however, his breadth was far greater than that of the present study. Pieters examined among others Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), John Keats (1795–1821), Jules Michelet (1798–1874), Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), and T.S. Eliot

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

13

(1888–1965). I greatly admire the work that Pieters has done in weaving together and unravelling the theoretical threads of inquiry from Aristotle, through scholars of mimesis in his focus on conversations with the dead (Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, George Steiner), to engage the theoretical contributions of Roland Barthes, Stephen Greenblatt, and many others in the fundamental inquiry of New Historicism in literature. I recognize that Pieters’s contribution has freed me to refocus on the Italian primary sources of eidolopoeia, and I will not speak with the dead from his theoretical perspective so much as puzzle why the dead are being made to speak. Not surprisingly, the Three Crowns provided some of the most interesting precedents for Renaissance Italian eidolopoeia. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the great idols of early Italian literature. Not only did what they write cause them to be crowned with admiration, they also were “made idols” in the sense that all three men were made to speak as spirits after their deaths. What their spirits were made to say and do (and why) will be much of the focus of subsequent chapters of this study. Here I investigate just some of the consequences of the ways in which all three authors experimented with ventriloquizing their own predecessors. The Great Eidolopoetic Experiment: Dante’s Divina Commedia Dante created a veritable multitude of damned, repentant, and blessed souls that were made to speak from beyond the grave in his Divina commedia, perhaps the greatest number and variety of eidolopoeia in all of literature.21 Many of the characters in the Commedia do not appear particularly controversial, and their placement within Dante’s other world goes relatively unquestioned. For example, it typically does not surprise the reader that Thomas Aquinas, saint and author of the Summa Theologica, appears amid the theologians on the heavenly sphere of the sun, or that Judas Iscariot is punished as a traitor to his Lord, because their defining traits in the poem correspond to their known earthly attributes or actions described in sacred scripture. Readers also tend to allow plenty of poetic licence for Dante to invent characters that represent historical people associated with him on a personal basis (i.e., Dante’s great-great-grandfather “Cacciaguida,” or “Beatrice”). But other characters have attracted more interest and much more critical speculation focused on how and why Dante’s portrayal of once-living

14

Speaking Spirits

people differed so strikingly from historical record, literary precedent, contemporary reputation, or some other external “proof” of their identities. Dante’s “Virgil” is an oft-cited case in point.22 Dante-author presents a pagan Virgil not only capable of expounding certain Christian beliefs, but also of writing texts that prompt the salvation of another pagan (“Statius,” Purg. 22.64–73). The presentation of “Virgil” is so beguiling and so tempting of the wildest “rewritings” of his character that some scholars have even raised the argument that Dante in the end saves “Virgil.”23 Another example to receive its own share of critical attention is the character of Brunetto Latini. In fact, Dante-author presents none of his fictional characters quite so poignantly, quite so ambivalently, and in the end perhaps quite so brutally, as he does his mentor and teacher of rhetoric. “Latini,” along with the other shades punished for violence against nature, rushes upon Dante-pilgrim in the third round of the seventh circle of hell. As Dante scholars have noted, the pilgrim’s acts of reverence (bowing his head and addressing “Latini” with the formal address of voi, for instance) contrast sharply with the way Danteauthor damns Latini24 – without providing the reader with a clear sense of what has been the exact sin for which Latini deserves this particular punishment of sprinting on burning sands.25 Dante-author perpetuates Latini’s memory among the living, not so much through the recollection of his Trésor (mentioned at Inf. 15.119), as the spirit of Latini exhorts, but instead through what was considered a scandalous infamy in Latini’s damnation for this particular sin.26 Cato of Utica presents another puzzle. His historical Stoicism, suicide, and politics (as an enemy of Caesar with the traitors Brutus and Cassius) led some critics (including John S. Carroll and John Ciardi)27 to argue that at the Final Judgment “Cato” would somehow be the only exception to the understanding that those souls that reach the mountain of Purgatory would all attain their heavenly goal.28 Cato was also Erich Auerbach’s famous example of a figura impleta, the absolute fulfilment or the endpoint of a person’s development in time, and Auerbach extended this notion to all of the historical people whom Dante-author represented in the Commedia: The encounters [between Dante-pilgrim and the souls of the dead] do not take place in this life, where men are always met with in a state of contingency that manifests only a part of their essence, and where the very intensity of life in the most vital moments makes self-awareness difficult

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

15

and renders a true encounter almost impossible. Nor do they take place in a hereafter where what is most personal in the personality is effaced by the shadows of death and nothing remains but a feeble, veiled, or indifferent recollection of life. No, the souls of Dante’s other world are not dead men, they are the truly living; though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else.29

I am struck by the enthusiasm that permeates Auerbach’s praise of Dante’s poetic powers to complete, concentrate, and manifest in fiction what Auerbach sees as the true entelechy of historical people. Given what so many scholars have repeated concerning the character of Brunetto Latini, for instance – that there is no evidence to suggest he was a sodomite – what exactly did Auerbach mean when he stated that Dante-author relied on “the concrete data” of the historical lives of his characters in representing their afterlives? Perhaps Auerbach implied that Dante knew from experience a fact about Latini’s sexuality that could not have been verified by others, or Auerbach might have been trusting in Dante-poet’s assertion that he merely recorded what he has seen of “God”’s judgment: the men who appear in the Comedy are already removed from earthly time and temporal destiny. Dante chose for his representation a very special setting which, as we have said above, opened up wholly new possibilities of expression to him and to him alone. Sustained by the highest authorities of reason and faith, his poetic genius ventured to undertake what no one had undertaken before him: to represent the entire earthly, historical world of his knowledge and experience as already subjected to God’s final judgment, so that each soul occupies the place assigned to it by the divine order. However, the individual figures, arrived at their ultimate, eschatological destination, are not divested of their earthly character. Their earthly historical character is not even attenuated, but rather held fast in all its intensity and so identified with their ultimate fate.30

I do not dispute that what Dante-author has done is undeniably special and unusually compelling. Dante-author succeeded in representing an entire otherworldly realm and making it seem as if it were “subjected to God’s final judgment.” I emphasize the seeming quality

16

Speaking Spirits

of this statement, however, because the strength of Dante’s rhetorical use of eidolopoeia rests on the sometimes subtle difference between the possibilities a reader is willing to allow for a divine determination of the fates of historical people and the representation of the fates of spirit characters of the same names within the poem by Dante-author. Another extremely sophisticated use of eidolopoetic speech that gives the reader an important insight into the nature of the rhetorical figure arises in the Commedia when a fictive dead character is made to quote a living person. For example, Dante-author presents in Inferno 27 the shade of Guido da Montefeltro, purportedly reporting precisely what Pope Boniface VIII promised him, that is, absolution in advance of the commission of sin.31 Even within the diegetic economy of the poem, in a conversation in which Dante-pilgrim and “Guido da Montefeltro” are the interlocutors, quoted speech of a third party amounts to little more than hearsay. Gossip, though it certainly can be true speech, should be considered by the receiver to be of suspect reliability unless it comes from an absolutely trustworthy source or until it can be tested against another reference. Its reliability should be all the more suspect in this case coming from the mouth of a shade damned for fraudulent counsel. Nonetheless, Dante-author paradoxically permits Guido’s placement in hell to confirm his eidolopoetic speech, as well as the nested hearsay (the words directly attributed by the shade to the pontiff). There may be an important lesson of eidolopoetic language to be gleaned here. The figure of eidolopoeia shares some affinities with hearsay. The speech that an author attributes to an idol (a spirit character) may be as reliable or as potentially unreliable as gossip, and there may be no effective means of proving its content, since the message is only ventriloquized from a mouthpiece invented by its disseminator. There can thus be the potential to slander or defame. While the living, including Boniface VIII, might be able to defend their reputations from defamation in writings, the dead cannot. Dante’s use of eidolopoeia, especially in the first canticle of his Commedia, violates a fundamental taboo: Non si getta fango sui morti (one must not cast mud upon the dead). That is to say: one must not speak ill of the dead, since they have no means to defend themselves from slights or falsehoods attributed to them. Given what has been said about eidolopoeia in Dante’s work, one might anticipate an unqualified condemnation of its use, but Danteauthor does not permit any so facile conclusion. Idolo is a hapax legomenon in Dante’s Commedia.32 The term is used at a crucial juncture in the

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

17

Earthly Paradise. In Purgatorio 31, “Beatrice” had just coaxed the confession from Dante-pilgrim that “Le presenti cose/col falso lor piacer volser miei passi/tosto che ’l vostro viso si nascose” (Purg. 31.34–6, “Present things with their false pleasure turned my steps as soon as your face was hidden”). The lesson that the spirit of Beatrice will offer the pilgrim rests on a habitus of faith: Dante must not believe what he sees in the present life (sirens, Purg. 31.45, and novelties of short duration, Purg. 31.60), but have faith in an eternal life. In other words, Dante must come to write about what is not (i.e., he writes fiction) in order to express what is (a reality beyond what can be verifiably seen in this world). When Dante gazes at “Beatrice” across the Lethe River and through her veil to see her looking at the gryphon (“la fiera/ch’è sola una persona in due nature,” Purg. 31.80–1: “the beast that is but one person in two natures”), the pilgrim observes that “she seemed to me to surpass her former self more than she surpassed other women here, when she was here” (Purg. 31.83–4: “vincer pariemi più sé stessa antica, /vincer che l’altre qui, quand’ella c’era”). After the pilgrim drinks from the river and is led across it to stand directly in front of the soul of his beloved, her eyes “pur sopra ’l grifone stavan saldi” (Purg. 31.120: were “still fixed unmoving on the gryphon”). What the pilgrim finally sees represented are the two natures of Christ. In a direct address to the reader, Dante-poet exclaims: “Pensa, lettor, s’io mi maravigliava,/ quando vedea la cosa in sé star queta,/e ne l’idolo suo si trasmutava” (Purg. 31.124–6, my emphasis: “Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw that the thing in itself remained unchanged, but in its eidolon transmuted itself!”). It is true that the term describes a mere image here (as in a reflection, not the thing itself), but that certainly does not charge the idol with necessarily negative connotations. On the contrary, Dante seems to suggest that without the eidolon he would not understand revelation – the basis of his spiritual belief in the second nature of the fiera – or the basis of his poetic expression in its first image – that of his beloved “Beatrice.” It is precisely the idol that assists in seeing a deeper, richer, surprising, and potentially salvific truth. Much more could certainly be said about Dante’s use of eidolopoeia, though it exceeds the focus of the present study. Nevertheless, Dante’s textual legacy determined in large part how subsequent generations remembered both the historical Dante and (whether rightly or perhaps quite wrongly) the others that he memorialized as eternally saved or damned. In Dante’s cultural context, the soul may be eternal, but a continuing presence among the living after one’s death takes concerted

18

Speaking Spirits

preparatory efforts. If, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors, in eidolopoeia the spirit’s reputation is written by the surviving (living) author. In various passages of this otherworldly journey, Danteauthor portrays his pilgrim self as understanding that his survivors will in turn have the power to determine how he is remembered. His Commedia, like Virgil’s writings in the hands of Statius in Purgatorio 21 and 22, or like the moralizing account of the Lancelot and Guenevere affair in the hands of Francesca da Rimini (Inf. 5), may be misread or misinterpreted. Dante appears to wrestle with the possibility that the reception of his work may depend less on his authorial intention and more on the limited intelligence, moral leanings, or other circumstances of his readers. In this regard, it is no wonder that at the close of the fifth canto of the Inferno the poet faints. The pilgrim’s swoon may express the existential angst of the poet who knows that he cannot fully author his post-mortem literary reception.33 Dante will not rest in peace after his death. His model of authoring fictive post-mortem legacies will come back to haunt him. His newly established authority on this subject, coupled with his compelling life experiences, will be conjured in the form of his spirit speaking in an astounding array of political, social, and literary contexts (explored in subsequent chapters). While Auerbach insisted that in Dante’s work “the unity of man’s earthly personality is preserved and fixed,” just the opposite paradoxically turns out to be true. In a world in which individuals are given post-mortem lives, they are never fixed. They do not enjoy the “perfection” of death or the “end” of their self-definition. Each figure – just as it is reinterpreted and re-represented by Dante – is also potentially re-representable by anybody. The spirit world of fiction is never immutable, and an ever-changing “Dante” will be idolized in order to ventriloquize whatever messages subsequent authors desire. Eidolopoeia in Africa and Secretum and Petrarch’s Fears concerning the Uses of the Dead Petrarch also experimented with eidolopoeia in many of his works, including his Africa, centred on the early life of Scipio Africanus the Elder (236–183 BC), the statesman of the Roman republic and victorious general of the Second Punic War, who embodied Petrarch’s ideal of secular virtue, and his Secretum, which like many of his letters projected the voice of an esteemed predecessor with whom he imagined being in dialogue – in this case, St Augustine of Hippo. For my present purposes,

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

19

I wish only to highlight briefly some of the effects that Petrarch’s use of the rhetorical figure added to the aforementioned considerations of eidolopoeia by Dante. Petrarch also used the figure to articulate a taboo, though one different from Dante’s. In terms of eidolopoeia in the Africa, Petrarch begins and ends the poem with visions of the speaking dead: in books 1 and 2, Scipio dreams he has a conversation with the spirits of his father and uncle, and in book 9 the character of Ennius has a dream featuring the ghost of Homer. Both the spirit of Scipio’s father and that of Homer mention a future poet, named in the latter vision as “Franciscus” [Petrarch], who will worthily sing the deeds of Scipio, and in doing so, earn the laurel crown for poetry. There is no denying that the first vision in Africa wilfully echoes aspects of Cicero’s dream of Scipio: they are both dream visions in which Scipio Africanus at a critical juncture receives needed encouragement from a deceased paternal figure. Both prophesy death to Scipio, but exhort duty to one’s country by describing a blessed afterlife for defenders of the republic. Moreover, both engage in important ways the res-publica. Cicero’s Republic with its concluding “Dream of Scipio” clearly intends to re-evoke Plato’s Republic with its concluding “Myth of Er” (614b–621d).34 In Cicero’s dream vision, the ghost of Scipio Africanus the Elder prophesies the events of his grandson Scipio’s life and the year of his death. The spirit points out the hierarchy and harmony of the spheres in great detail. When Scipio focuses on the paltriness of earth far below, the spirit reminds him of the fleeting quality of worldly fame and the need to aim continually for virtue and the consequent rewards of eternal life, the pre-eminent virtue being service on behalf of one’s country.35 Cicero scholars emphasize the main rhetorical function of the dream vision as an exhortation to patriotic duty. Macrobius (born c. 360) penned a Neoplatonic commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. It is precisely these similarities, however, that allow Petrarch to highlight crucial divergences from his primary model.36 This res-publica is radically different as Cicero represents it in his republic and as Petrarch’s praises it to his addressee King Robert of Sicily. For Petrarch, the king’s deeds will serve to enhance the glories of the poet himself: “tu nempe iuvabis/Materia, generose, tua, calamumque labantem/Firmabis, meritumque decus continget amanti/Altera temporibus pulcerrima laurea nostris” (1.67–70; “and you, most generous King, will help me with your deeds and lend more power to my faltering pen.

20

Speaking Spirits

Another crown of laurel, the most fair of all our times, will justly then reward with honor one who holds your person dear”).37 Petrarch’s “public thing” became the glorification of letters above arms. Indeed, what is noticeably absent from his Africa is the detailed, glorifying description of actual Roman military battles.38 The spirit of Publius Cornelius appears to his son Scipio Africanus the Elder in a dream, tells him not to fear, and states that God has granted him only one hour to explain future events to him and guide him through the heavens so that Scipio might understand the worthiness of the sacrifice he must make. The spirit gives an account of the battle in Spain against the Carthaginians that brought about his own death, which, he explains in terms reminiscent of Christological teachings, is not a death that represents some kind of end or finality but rather a sure (eternal) life. He proves his point by indicating the smiling figure of his brother – Scipio’s uncle, Gnaeus Cornelius – and other heroic Romans who had earned their places in the other world according to their good deeds in life. The spirit of Gnaeus Cornelius introduces the spirits of the ancient kings of Rome who practised virtue, followed by the parade of dead Roman heroes, which closes the first book. The second book concludes the first of the Africa’s dream visions by presenting a series of prophecies. The character Scipio learns of the triumph and decline of Rome. He also hears of his own death and that he will be buried in an unworthy tomb. But a young Etruscan poet, “Lelius alter” (Africa 2.524: “a second Ennius”), writing of Scipio’s deeds will permit him to triumph over death. The ghostly sire exhorts Scipio nevertheless: “Sed preclarissimus exul/Viventi illatum moriens ulciscere verbo/Dedecus, et patrie cineres atque ossa negato,/Ingratamque voca, memorique inscribe sepulcro. Hoc lieceat tantum” (Africa 2.547–8: “In splendid exile die and with a word avenge the unjust disgrace that she imposed on you in life: deny your thankless fatherland your last remains and leave inscribed upon your tomb the tale of cold ingratitude. So much is right”). Scipio is counselled to trust in the poet to come. Both this first dream vision of the Africa and the one in book 9, even more insistently, compare Petrarch to Ennius (239–169 BC), the father of Roman poetry, whose Annales opened with a vision of the ghost of Homer. Ennius originally narrated the encounter with the Homeric shade in order to claim authority for his scholarship. Petrarch reiterates this use of eidolopoeia as an anecdote told by Ennius, companion of Scipio and witness to heroic exploits. At Scipio’s behest to pass the time during the triumphal return voyage to Rome, Ennius tells Scipio that

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

21

on the night when the outcome of Scipio’s war was most in doubt, he fell asleep, and there appeared to him an aged, sightless man with wild hair and tattered toga who greeted Ennius: “‘Salve, care michi Latie telluris amice/Unice! quodque diu votis animoque petisti,/Aspice qualis erat quondam dum vixit Homerus’” (Africa 9.173–5; “‘Friend, my only friend among the Latins, greetings! Here stands what your heart and mind have so long yearned for, here behold Homer as he appeared in living flesh’”). Walking together with the shade, Ennius learns that Rome will triumph over Carthage, then he sees a youth resting beneath a laurel tree. The spirit of Homer explains to Ennius that this is the young poet called Franciscus (“Francisco cui nomen erit,” Africa 9.232). He will give his poem the title Africa (Africa 9.234–5: “titulusque poematis illi/AFRICA”), and Quin etiam ingenii fiducia quanta, Quantus aget laudum stimulus! seroque triumpho Hic tandem ascendet Capitolia vestra, nec ipsum Mundus iners studiisque aliis tunc ebria turba Terrebit quin insigni florentia lauro Tempora descendens referat comitante Senatu. (Africa 9.236-41) How great will be his faith in his own gifts! How strong the love of fame that leads him on! At last in tardy triumph he will climb the Capitol. Nor shall a heedless world nor an illiterate herd, inebriate with baser passions, turn aside his steps when he descends, flanked by the company of Senators, and from the rite returns with brow girt by the glorious laurel wreath.39

Just when Ennius has eagerly addressed the youth in his dreams and sees that Franciscus is raising his head to respond, his dream abruptly ends, and the wakened Ennius says that he saw Scipio leading his men into battle. The character of Scipio in book 9 refuses to seem gullible about dreams and visions when he states, “Seu sunt, seu talia fingis,/Dulcia sunt, fateor, sensusque et pectora mulcent” (Africa 9.302–3: “Whether such things be true or fancy-bred, I will confess that they are sweet to hear; they charm the imagination and the heart”). But, Scipio notes, Ennius’s dream serves to confirm another – the one he had in the first two books featuring the spirits of his father and uncle – and Scipio recognizes Petrarch: “Promissumque michi gemino sponsore profecto/ Diligo, quisquis erit; si nullus, diligo nullum” (Africa 9.306–7: “he is

22

Speaking Spirits

mine by warrant of this double sponsorship. Whoever he may be I cherish him, and if an empty name, why then I’ll cherish an empty name”). Both visions at the level of narrative are fictions. But precisely because the author repeats himself with two different spirit characters in two different books of his poem, he appears to feign some kind of independent verification of what otherwise might only seem “fancy-bred” notions of the imagination. While Dante asserted himself as “sesto tra cotanto senno” (sixth among that great company of classical souls in the first circle of hell, Inf. 4.102), Petrarch much more insistently compelled the illustrious dead to speak on his behalf.40 In fact, his use of the spirits of the poets Homer and Ennius in his Africa is emblematic of how by means of eidolopoeia he could violate a different taboo. Petrarch was not so much interested in speaking ill of the dead as he was interested in praising himself. Dante indicated that he sought to avoid praising himself because he found it “al postutto biasimevole a chi lo fae” (Vita nuova 28.2: “the most reprehensible thing one can do”). Petrarch adopted the rhetorical figure of eidolopoeia in order to praise himself, while making that praise appear to come from others. Moreover, having the spirit of Homer single out “Franciscus,” bedecked in a laurel crown and hailed as “alter Lelius” (another Ennius), was so compelling that this example of eidolopoeia prompted life to imitate fiction. Even before Petrarch could complete his poem on the deeds of Scipio, he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline hill of Rome. In addition to its function of selfpraise, Petrarch’s use of eidolopoeia had controversial political consequences that become more evident if one considers Petrarch’s “Letter to Cicero” in the Familiares and Pier Paolo Vergerio’s reply “In the Voice of Cicero,” Leonardo Bruni’s creation of a “New Cicero,” and the debates of humanist writers (Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Francesco Barbaro, Guarino Veronese, among others) on the relative merits of Scipio Africanus versus Julius Caesar.41 Nevertheless, Petrarch does not limit the use of eidolopoeia to articulate matters concerning public things. He also conjures a speaking spirit to dramatize his most private thoughts and fears, as well, in his Secretum (Secret Book, probably begun in 1347).42 In the presence of allegorical Truth, Franciscus debates with the revered spirit of St Augustine. The impetus of the work, as Petrarch stated in the proem, is his meditation on the transitory quality of life and the inevitability of his death: “Attonito michi quidem et sepissime cogitanti qualiter in hanc vitam intrassem, qualiter ve forem egressurus, contigit nuper ut

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

23

non, sicut egros animos solet, somnus opprimeret, sed anxium atque pervigilem” (22: “I was lost in thought, considering as I often do the way in which I came into this world and the way in which I must leave it; not overcome with sleep, as sick people often are, but wide awake with anxiety,” 3).43 Truth states to “Augustine” that Franciscus is already “half-dead” (“semianimis”), and she suggests that Augustine’s life experience of the condition and enhanced perspective on it from without the imprisonment of the body could benefit Petrarch.44 Couching it as a conversation over the course of three days with a friend, Petrarch dramatizes his inner turmoil – the conflicts between his desire for fame and the spiritual checks on authorial hubris, his love attachments characterized as less than virtuous, his dreams of glory, and his admitted struggles against acedia. In the end, the brief work concludes “with a sense of unresolved conflict,”45 though not before “Augustine” has valorized the Africa through repeated citations of the work that eventually persuade Franciscus, whose pose initially rests on a repudiation of the epic poem. The same narratological distinctions so evident between Dante-author and Dante-pilgrim thus reappear here in terms of Petrarch-author of the Secretum and Franciscus. Along with Petrarch’s practical use of eidolopoeia in his Africa and Secretum also came a theoretical elaboration, illuminated in his letters, of the role of authorship or authority in bolstering fictions. Petrarch endorsed the work of poets to recreate in literature great exemplars of antiquity for contemporary understanding and emulation, but he also cautioned Boccaccio in a letter to distinguish how others, including a purportedly prophesying priest, used stories simply to fool others. In his Rereum senilium libri (Letters of Old Age), Petrarch took advantage of a curious incident to caution Boccaccio about authorship and constructions of authority to mask a fiction. Although Seniles 1.5 is not an example of eidolopoeia, its content concerns closely how Petrarch thought about who arrogates interpreting the purported messages of the speaking dead. The letter, dated 28 May [1362], was sent from Padua in response to Boccaccio’s anxious account of a colloquium. A reputed holy man named Pietro Petroni of Siena claimed, just before he died, to have received a vision of Christ. After Petroni’s death, his messenger endeavoured to travel throughout Italy and other parts of Europe to seek out the famous people whom the vision concerned. Among those celebrities were Petrarch and Boccaccio. Boccaccio received the messenger first and

24

Speaking Spirits

was relaying the substance of a warning: Petroni predicted that the end of Boccaccio’s life was at hand and that he must relinquish the cultivation of poetry (presumably in favour of Scripture and a concern for the state of his soul). Much of Petrarch’s response entailed consoling his friend – for truly Petrarch’s words were meant to be a consolation – that the news that Boccaccio was nearing the end of his life was no great prophecy, given his advancing years. Moreover, after a life of misery and toil, death should be happily anticipated.46 Petrarch averred that to see Christ while still living would be a great event “si vera; usitatum enim et vetustum est plerunque mendaciis fictisque sermonibus velum religionis sanctimonieque pretendere, ut humanam fraudem tegat divinitatis opinio” (“if it is true. For it is an ancient custom to draw the veil of religion and sanctimony over lies and invented stories in general so that belief in divinity covers human trickery”).47 And he continued, “Non extenuo vaticinii pondus: quicquid a Cristo dicitur verum est. Fieri nequit ut veritas mentiatur. At id queritur, Cristusne rei huius actor sit an alter quispiam ad commenti fidem, quod sepe vidimus, Cristi nomen assumpserit” (“I am not belittling the import of the prophecy, for whatever is said by Christ is true. It is impossible for truth to lie. But the question is whether Christ is the author of this or whether someone else, as we have often seen, assumed the name of Christ to lend support to a fiction”).48 Petrarch expressed wariness here over the believability of the messenger of a reputed holy man and indicated his awareness of the broader implications of the ploys of authors to bolster the believability of their fiction. I shall return in chapter 4 to consider Petrarch’s Testamentum and his Epistola posteritati (Letter to Posterity) in terms of a broader understanding of eidolopoeia. Boccaccio’s Use of Eidolopoeia in Facing the Mortality of His Two Masters Boccaccio lived long enough to offer public lectures on Dante’s Commedia in 1373–4 at the behest of the Commune of Florence, as well as to write after Petrarch’s death in 1374 a letter addressed directly to his Africa, inviting the poem to circulate in Florence. Both of his masters were thus with him in spirit in his final years. Boccaccio died on 21 December 1375, after years of investigating issues concerning eidolopoeia. Here I focus primarily on the narrative framework of his De casibus virorum illustrium (The Fates of Illustrious

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

25

Men, c. 1370 in its first redaction and c. 1373 in its second redaction dedicated to Mainardo Cavalcanti).49 Inspired by classical and Petrarchan precedents,50 this work figures throngs of spirits parading through Boccaccio’s study and pleading with him to permit them to live on in the memory of posterity by recording their deeds in his book. Eidolopoeia is not in this case the relatively straightforward rhetorical ploy used to present the biographies of historical figures that it might at first seem to be. Closer examination of some of the interactions between Boccaccio the character and the dead spirits, as well as the parallel conversation between Boccaccio and the doppelgänger of Petrarch, reveals deeper motivations for the author’s representation of eidolopoeia. Not unlike Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, Boccaccio’s encyclopedic Latin work has a primary impetus that is pedagogical: by recording the examples of famous predecessors, he hopes to educate his readers to avoid vice and to pursue tenaciously what is just and good. Boccaccio nonetheless admits that another motive prompts his project: his own fame and glory, which he hopes to gain through composing the work. The first inklings of this motivation appear on the opening page of the dedication: Non enim satis mecum conveniebam cui nam primo illud mictere vellem, ut nomini suo aliquid afferret ornatui, et, eiusdem adiutus subsidiis melioribus quam mei auspiciis, prodiret in medium. Cupimus enim omnes, quadam umbratili inpulsi gloria, quibus auxiliis possumus fragiles labores nostros nobilitare et diutiores facere; et scriptores potissime.51 Thus I was at first unable to decide to whom I should dedicate this work, to whose name it might nicely adorn, and through whose protection it might issue with better auspices than mine could muster. All of us, moved by the shadowy impulses to glory, yearn for our fragile toils to become more noble and more lasting – and this [yearning] is even greater in us writers.

Boccaccio is even more amusingly insistent in the opening chapter of the eighth book when, talking to himself, he questions his purpose: Quid demens sudore excruciaris in tanto? Quid veterum monimenta revolvens tam assiduo vexaris labore cum a nemine inpellaris? Ex antiquorum ruinis, ex cineribus infortunatorum, novis literulis extorquere conaris

26

Speaking Spirits famam atque protelare dies nomenque tuum desideras. O insana cupido! Adveniet hora, et iam est, que te a rebus mortalibus eximat, que corpusculum conterat tuum, que te convertat in fabulam. Dolt, why do you torture yourself with so much sweaty effort? Why do you vex yourself with such continual toil, poring over the tomes of the ancients, when no one is forcing you? You wish to prolong your days and your name through a reputation acquired by rescribbling on the ruin of the ancients. What a crazy desire! The hour will come, and is already here, which will take you away from the things of this mortal world, destroy your little body, and turn you into a fable [or fiction].

Death, Boccaccio reasons with himself, is about to turn him into a fabulam, a narrative whose words describe what is not real.52 Boccaccio continues his reasoning: “Quid, oro … etiam si orbis totus ore pleno nil aliud preter nomen tuum cum laude cantet, absens, honoris aut voluptatis assummes? Cum ea quippe perierit effigies qua cognosceris, profecto transitoria tibi cuncta peribunt” (even if the tongues of all the world sing the praises of no other name but yours, I pray you, what honours and pleasure will be left to you then? When the form by which you are known has been lost, every other transitory thing will also truly be lost to you). His distinction between what is real and what is fabulam hinges on what he experiences during his life as opposed to what those who survive him might think or say about him. Boccaccio concludes that he would do better to seize the days that remain to him and enjoy himself rather than toil too mightily for possible recognition, which he would not be able to accept post-mortem: “Desine igitur et quod datur vite residuum, voluptatibus deditus et pro temporis qualitate pretereas” (Therefore stop, and what little is left of your life, pass it in enjoying yourself, according to the opportunities that you are offered). Nevertheless, Boccaccio, who serves both as the author of De casibus and as a character within the narrative who sees the spirits, listens to their tales, and writes in order to commemorate their lives, completes seven books before he returns to reassess his project. So many spirits come to him that he must choose to write about some of them and to pass over others. Among the spirits that he claims appear in his study are those of rulers, such as Theseus of Athens and King Arthur; biblical figures, including Samson and Saul; and other distinguished figures, including warriors (i.e., Gaius Marius), a pope (John XII), and orators

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

27

(including Cicero). Boccaccio portrays most of the spirits as pleading with him to give voice to their deeds. Boccaccio the character admits to his readers of being so weary from his task that, at the outset of the eighth book, he can hardly keep himself from succumbing to a laziness that is “quietem corporis nimiam torporis matrem et ingenii hostem fore” (8.1; p. 650: the mother of sluggishness and the enemy of genius). Moreover, he feels as if he has almost become a corpse in his own right (“in tantum tanque profundum demersus soporem sum ut, nedum alteri, verum michi ipsi immobilis factus mortuus fere viderer,” 8.1; p. 650: I fell into a sleep so profound that it seemed to me as much as to others that I had almost become an unmovable dead man). This torpor is the flip side of commemoration: while the works of great authors leave a legacy that keeps the authors, as well as their protagonists, “alive” in the hearts and minds of readers of subsequent ages, authorial acedia can lead to sleep, a lack of work, which makes writers resemble immobile corpses even during their physical “lives” and causes their protagonists’ actions to be forgotten.53 Giorgio Agamben elaborated this nexus in the first chapter of his study Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture). In the context of the Christian spiritual life he notes: “Acedia, tristitia, taedium vitae, desidia sono i nomi che i padri della Chiesa dànno alla morte che esso induce nell’anima” (“Acedia [sloth)], tristitia [sorrow], taedium vitae [weariness, loathing of life], and desidia [idleness] are the names the church fathers gave to the death this sin induced in the soul”).54 This “noonday demon” presented a phenomenology with some important similarities to Boccaccio’s description of his character’s behaviour in De casibus.55 What follows in the eighth book of De casibus is a dialogue between the characters of the two authors: Boccaccio and Petrarch. “Petrarch,” whom Boccaccio represents as coming to his study in a vision, appears just as the many spirits of the illustrious dead did in previous pages of De casibus. However, Petrarch was still alive at this point (and is thus technically represented as a doppelgänger, rather than as a ghost or eidolopoetic protagonist proper). Boccaccio recognizes the figure as that of “optimum venerandumque preceptorem meum” (652; my great and esteemed teacher) wearing his “virenti laurea insignitum” (652; green laurel crown). Boccaccio-character is pointedly not asleep and not dreaming the encounter. Boccaccio, for whom Petrarch’s example and advice have always served to spur him on in his studies, blushes in shame at the sight of this doppelgänger. The spirit character upbraids

28

Speaking Spirits

with particular severity the writer’s slothful attitude, praising the fame that virtuous people seek through their just labours. It is fame, Petrarch’s spirit states: morientium corporum animas, quasi per stratum iter, summa cum claritate deducit in celos, in terris relictis nominibus perpetuo splendore conspicuis. Hec brevissimum mortalis vite tempus facit amplissimum et, quasi vita alia, defunctorum posteritati meritos testatur honores. (654) that leads to heaven the souls of dying bodies by a bright light, as if by a paved road, leaving behind on earth in perpetual splendour the names of the worthy. Fame makes the all-too-brief time of mortal life very long and, like a second life, attests to posterity the honours that the deceased deserve.

“Petrarch” remembers great men from the past (including Abraham, Moses, Homer, and Aristotle): “aliosque insignes viros, quos quasi perenni viriditate ipsa in hodiernum usque deduxit perpetuos” (654; and other famous men whose fame has kept them alive to this day almost with perennial freshness), and continues: “Quos, ea agente, noscimus laudamus et colimus magnamque animi voluptatem sentimus, dum id quod illi suscipiunt a nobis, nos labore nostro apud futuros posse suscipere credimus” (654; And we, through their fame, know them, praise them, venerate them, and feel great pleasure in our souls, while we believe that we can obtain from them through our efforts what they receive from us). The spirit’s rebuke culminates in a moving call to action, which for Boccaccio becomes a call to cast off his laziness and continue writing De casibus, a task that he eagerly accepts, and Petrarch’s doppelgänger mysteriously disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared. In these few pages, Boccaccio-author effectively minimizes the distance or difference between the realms of the living and the dead in various ways. First, he portrays the spirit of Petrarch as appearing in his study in much the same way as the spirits of the illustrious dead did throughout De casibus – though Petrarch was still alive. As a consequence of this kind of portrayal, Boccaccio implicitly exalts his avowed master by figuring Petrarch on the same narrative plane as the rulers, soldiers, and orators of the previous books. Boccaccio prefigures Petrarch’s place in the pantheon of the esteemed dead even before Petrarch’s death. At the same time, Boccaccio acknowledges his debt to Petrarch “inter

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

29

mortales nostro evo gloriosissimus homo” (660; the most glorious of all men of our age), while placing in “Petrarch”’s mouth the great man’s approval of the present work and his encouragement that Boccaccio continue its composition, making the documentation of earlier heroes’ fame seem almost a duty or commandment from on high, rather than the pursuit of personal vanity that Boccaccio nonetheless admits that it is in the passage already cited (“Ex antiquorum ruinis, ex cineribus infortunatorum, novis literulis extorquere conaris famam atque protelare dies nomenque tuum desideras,” 650; you wish to prolong your days and your name through a reputation acquired by rescribbling on the ruin of the ancients). The illusion of the co-mingling of the realms of the living and the dead nonetheless also works on another level: Boccaccio-author makes it seem as if Boccaccio the writing character is also almost a part of this world of the illustrious dead. His sleepiness causes him, as previously cited, to become like an unmovable dead man, and he notes that the time is very near when his little body will be taken from him in death and he will thus be turned into a “fabulam,” a fiction. Although man is born to work, Petrarch’s spirit intones (“ad laborem nascitur homo,” 652), Boccaccio is seen as feigning death in his reclining acedia. But just as Boccaccio’s torpid snoozing cannot approximate the behaviour of the illustrious (who even in death actively parade, plead, weep, and otherwise endeavour to leave a name for themselves), Petrarch’s spirit makes it clear that Boccaccio’s attitude will lead him to the shadows (tenebrae) rather than to the light (luce). After these most inspiring words of the entire work, pronounced by Petrarch’s spirit, Boccaccio suggests that his will to pursue the virtue of writing is reconfirmed. The spirit’s words serve as a goad. Boccaccio describes his less-than-noble “death” (his lazy sleep) in terms that are not dissimilar to those used by Dante to describe his journey through hell in the Commedia: Boccaccio is made so ashamed by his “guide” (Petrarch’s doppelgänger) that “continuo verissimis redargutionibus suis ad inferos usque demersus” (660; [he was] laid low to the very bottom of hell by [Petrarch’s] just reprimands).56 Dante’s poetic realization of the experience of the other world while yet alive, as well as Boccaccio’s similar, though much condensed, allusion to it in the context of the spirit world coming to him, charges Boccaccio’s De casibus and many instances of eidolopoeia with the gravity, aura of sacrality, authority, and urgency that I would argue few other fictions muster with such (perhaps paradoxically surprising) conviction.

30

Speaking Spirits

Much of the soaring speech attributed to Petrarch’s spirit consists of a defence of the pursuit of fame. Boccaccio initially viewed the pursuit of fame as vain, and even when it was attained, fame was short-lived, so he had convinced himself to enjoy his rest instead (“Talibus ergo plurimisque similibus suadente desidia, semivictus imo victus in totum, caput, quod in cubitum surrecturus erexeram, in pulvinar iterum reclinavi,” 652; While laziness persuaded me with these and many other similar words, almost convinced – no, overcome absolutely – I stretched out, lowering my head, which I had been supporting with my elbow, onto a pillow). But Petrarch’s spirit defends the labour in pursuit of fame; and unlike infamy or notoriety, the doppelgänger states, fame is earned only by the exercise of virtue: “Fama, quam tu paulo ante damnabas, tanquam bonum a cunctis mortalibus exoptata est. Que cum variis perquiratur viis, non nisi per virtutem acquiritur” (654; That fame that you were just disparaging was desired by all men as a good. It is sought by many paths, but it cannot be attained except by means of virtue). Fame permits a kind of second life of the virtuous dead among posterity. Fame allows future generations to remember great exemplars, and this act of remembrance is also a pleasure (volumptatem). Even saints, such as Jerome and Augustine, also sought personal fame through their works, a motivation that the spirit characterizes as a positive stimulus to work.57 Moreover, fame produces yet another good, according to the spirit: it renders splendid and majestic even those virtuous ones who were hunchbacked, crippled, and otherwise deformed: “Agit et in preteritos istud desiderabile bonum fama, ut gibbos claudos, torvos et quacunque vis deformitate deformes, decoros, splendidos augustosque posteritati demonstret” (658; Fame with respect to ancient people also produces this positive effect: by representing to posterity the hunchbacked, crippled, cross-eyed, and the deformed of any deformity as beautiful, splendid, and stately). This passage presents its own difficulties. Petrarch’s spirit makes it clear that even if the true image of the dead is lost among the living, God is never fooled, and the spirit exhorts Boccaccio to exercise the gift of writing that is conferred on him by God. But the doppelgänger’s words create a snag that will cause the fabric of eidolopoetic praise to unravel. The suggestion here is that the chronicler has the potential to misrepresent the famous person or to focus on a true inner quality (virtue), rather than on a person’s physical exterior appearance (such as a bodily deformity).58

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

31

The potential problem is this: physical traits are readily apparent to all who see, and – for better or for worse – there can be a measure of verification in this objectification of the person. Assessing a person’s inner qualities is a decidedly trickier business: It is more difficult to determine if a person is thinking virtuous thoughts than if the same person is walking with a limp, for instance. What subsequent chroniclers choose to emphasize will come back to haunt “Petrarch,” especially in Girolamo Malipiero’s representation examined in the next chapter, but also “Boccaccio,” though somewhat less maliciously in representations by Vincenzo Bagli (in chapter 1) and Jacopo Caviceo (in chapter 3). If Petrarch has a special place in Boccaccio’s De casibus, highlighted by his lone status as doppelgänger, there is one more truly unusual apparition in Boccaccio’s study: that of “Dante.” Unlike the other souls filing by Boccaccio’s desk, Dante’s spirit refuses to beg to be remembered in this work. Boccaccio lavishes praise on the spirit of this “poetam insignem” (834; illustrious poet) and “civitatis nostre decus eximium” (836; great honour of our city), whose many works worthy of eternal memory, coupled with the tragedies of his civic expulsion, exile, and death abroad, would be too much for Boccaccio’s weak powers to narrate, he states. But Dante’s spirit stops him: “Siste, fili mi tam effluenter in laudes meas effundere verba, et te tam parcum tuarum ostendere” (836; Stop, my son, and do not squander your words in my praise, while showing such stinginess towards yourself). While Boccaccio makes it seem as if the other spirits appear to him out of their own self-interest, the spirit of Dante comes across as unusually magnanimous. He does not beg on his own behalf, stating flatly, “Novi ingenium tuum; et quid merear novi” (836; I know your genius, and know what I have earned). Instead the spirit charges Boccaccio to write against Walter, Duke of Athens, described as the eternal stain on the liberty of Florence, so that Florentines might recognize such tyrants and refuse to be dominated by them in the future. In the way that Boccaccio utilizes eidolopoeia here, he deftly succeeds in making it seem as if “Dante” praises Boccaccio, while Boccaccio places in the mouth of arguably the most esteemed Florentine of recent memory Boccaccio’s own scathing political condemnation of the Duke of Athens. Of course, it is appropriate that Dante’s spirit should be the one to insist that Boccaccio’s words be employed to shame the memory of another – Dante, civil servant and political exile,

32

Speaking Spirits

Dante, whose literary masterpiece had as a clear outcome the recording of the shame of others – most notably, though not exclusively, in the Inferno. While the historical Dante never suffered the tyranny at the hands of the Duke of Athens that his spirit so decries, Boccaccio uses this authoritative spirit as a mouthpiece to shame the malefactors within Florentine political circles in his own day who supported the duke’s rise to power and the divisive factionalism that ensued.59 In De casibus, Boccaccio’s character obliges the spirit of Dante to articulate the indignation of lost Florentine liberty. The account of Walter, Duke of Athens, serves as an important reminder that the author has the means both to exalt and to condemn, to praise and to revile; he can commemorate the good, but he can also wield the life story of another as an anti-exemplum for posterity ever after. Boccaccio’s work comes to a close after just a few more pages with the author’s excuse that his focus on the downturn of human fortunes should not make him seem an enemy to eternal light. Boccaccio seizes this occasion to praise Petrarch as philosopher and poet laureate, and his master, imploring him to revise or edit De casibus out of charity for him, and he bids his “parve liber” (870; tiny book) to endure, bringing fame to his dedicatee Mainardo Cavalcanti and to himself. To summarize, Boccaccio and the other Crowns of early Italian literature launch a period of intense focus on how a culture is to remember and write about fictions and figures. The Renaissance, or rebirth, is a literalization of a congress between the living and the dead. Renaissance humanists conjured the greats of antiquity in order to instruct or to inspire themselves and their contemporaries through the remembrance of great works and deeds. Writers from Leonardo Bruni to Lorenzo Valla, from Giannozzo Manetti to Leon Battista Alberti, and many others provided evidence of a renewed devotion to humanistic studies and their narration of the human condition – past and present – to be archived, safeguarded, and passed down as a cultural legacy to posterity. Even before and certainly after the flowering of Renaissance humanism, writers produced, alongside many relatively accurate classical histories and biographies and remarkably strong philological analyses of texts, an astonishing number and array of wildly inventive accounts of supernatural communications with fictional characters representing historical personages. I shall present in the chapters that follow just some of the ways that this powerful figure of rhetoric influenced outcomes in the literary, legal, and political realms.

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

33

Breakdown of Chapters and Procedures In chapter 1, “Rewriting the Auctor: Revising according to the Text’s Letter or Spirit?” I examine the ways in which narratives featuring the souls of dead authors influence specifically authorial issues. In these cases, fictive spirits are used to serve as arbiters of textual correctness or literary quality. In some cases, Renaissance authors figure the spirits of earlier writers in order to give a kind of imprimatur to revised versions of earlier works. For example, Vincenzo Bagli represents a spirit of Boccaccio in order to endorse Bagli’s vernacular translation and amplification of a catalogue of illustrious ladies in the 1506 edition of De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women). In another case by Girolamo Malipiero, the editor creates a ghostly character – “Petrarcha” – that expounds views that are radically different from those of the historical Petrarch, views much more consonant with Malipiero’s own opinions, prompting analysis of the consequences of reauthoring the auctor. Finally, Antonio Manetti’s treatment of the spirit of Guido Cavalcanti in the third example of the chapter calls into question the ultimate utility of eidolopoetic narratives for humanist researchers. Chapter 2, “Divining Dante: Scandals of His Corpus and Corpse,” considers attempts to appropriate both Dante’s texts and Dante’s spirit through examples of eidolopoeia featuring Dante’s wandering soul. Boccaccio claimed that Dante’s ghost appeared to Jacopo Alighieri to point out where Dante had hidden the final cantos of the Divina commedia, which had purportedly not been received by Dante’s patron before the poet’s death. Historical attempts by Florentines to translate Dante’s remains from his tomb in Ravenna to Santa Croce in Florence did not succeed, but I argue that Florentines sought to compensate for this failure by reclaiming quite effectively the spirit of Dante through various other eidolopoetic narratives analysed in this chapter, including ones by Antonio d’Orsino Benintendi, Marsilio Ficino, and Girolamo Benivieni. Chapter 3, “Genius Loci: Exile, Citizenship, and the Place of Burial,” continues the themes of the previous chapter by presenting four more examples of eidolopoeia that adopt the same tactic of claiming the authority of a spirit’s message, but to different ends. Machiavelli and Zacharia Ferreri call on the ghost of Dante in an effort to convince authorities to end their states of exile. Jacopo Caviceo invokes the spirit of Boccaccio to argue for Ferrarese literary and cultural preeminence, but his attempt does not succeed in the same way that the

34

Speaking Spirits

Florentine tales featuring Dante’s spirit in the previous chapter did. Finally, Benivieni – who evokes the spirit-voice of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – succeeds in portraying “Pico” as distraught and unsatisfied with a shabby tomb outside the walls of Florence’s Church of San Marco. By means of this poetic portrayal, Benivieni managed to do for Pico what Florentines did not for Dante: move his corporeal remains to what was held to be a more respectable resting place. But was Benivieni defying the historical Pico’s final wishes? The ethical implications of Benivieni’s act – well-intentioned as it may have been – make this example of eidolopoeia particularly haunting. In chapter 4, “Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum: Some Not-So-Final Thoughts,” I extend the inquiries and implications of these forms of ideological eidolopoeia. In addressing authorial perspective, I analyse one frequently recurring spirit narrative – the vow between friends that whoever dies first will return to the surviving friend to provide information about the afterlife – in its representation by three different writers. The message communicated by the dead spirit in each instance differs according to the aim of each author. In thinking more deeply about the motives for evoking the dead, I look at an example of the use of the spirit of St Thomas Aquinas to articulate a surprisingly secular Florentine political prophecy in a vision by Antonio da Rieti; and I reassess one well-studied but as yet not fully understood example of private, non-authorial eidolopoeia. Giovanni Morelli wrote of communicating with his dead nine-year-old son in his merchant diary, Ricordi. The explicitly restricted audience for his text (addressed to his surviving progeny), as well as the contrast in tone with another example of eidolopoeia of a dead child (Boccaccio’s eclogue Olympia), help to clarify Morelli’s undeclared purpose for writing it. I conclude this chapter by examining attempts by authors to determine their post-mortem situations while they are still alive. Through instructions in last wills and letters, it is possible to see how authors attempted to dictate what they wanted after their deaths. I highlight Petrarch’s Epistola posteritati (Letter to Posterity), in which he revealed his anguish in knowing that others might very well remember him quite differently from the way that he endeavoured so purposefully to be viewed in life. Petrarch’s letter represents his keenness to define the terms of his legacy – that is, to assert some claim of protection for his spirit akin to the legal form of protection for the body, habeas corpus. Throughout this study, I summarize lengthy eidolopoetic narratives and cite in full those that are relatively brief. English translations are

Eidolopoeia: Idol Making

35

mine unless otherwise noted. While the habit may become tiresome, in this study I use quotation marks with a person’s name to distinguish this fictive spirit character from a historical person and author. Thus, for example, Malipiero’s narrator speaks to “Petrarch” (i.e., Petrarch’s spirit) in Il Petrarcha spirituale. I refer to people using the people-specific pronouns of he/she, who, whom, etc., but with spirits I use the nonpersonal pronouns it, that, its, etc. in order to emphasize the objectification of the fictive character. As the critically sophisticated reader might already easily anticipate, the study of eidolopoeia invites quick dismissal. After all, the creation of characters is part and parcel of literature; even when a character is based on a real person, it is a fictional representation. Moreover, different people may very well remember any historical event or individual in different ways. Any given human being will wear a variety of masks in representing his/her identity to others. Individuals can and do change over the course of time. No human being can ever see him/ herself objectively, and truth is subjective.60 Even so, I prefer not to bury, so to speak, quite so readily this subject of eidolopoeia and the conundrums it raises precisely because it forces us to face and to reconsider these unsettling ethical and existential questions.

1 Rewriting the Auctor: Revising according to the Text’s Letter or Spirit?

Lasciati i sensi veri, [alcuni spositori] fanno tali farnetichi su alcune cose di [Petrarca], che paiono spiritati, che dicano le maraviglie, – ai quali non più si terrebbe obbligato il Petrarca se gli vedesse questi loro sogni, che si terrebbe a chi l’ha fatto spirituale vestendolo da frate Minore; & poi cingendolo di corda gli a messo gli zoccoli in piedi. Having departed from the true meanings, [certain commentators] rave so deliriously about some of Petrarch’s things that they appear to be possessed, such that they say fantastic things, to which Petrarch would no more be obliged if he had seen these dreams of theirs than he would be to anyone who made him “spiritual” by dressing him up as a Friar Minor, cinching him with a cord, and putting sandals on his feet. – Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cintio

In the Introduction, I began to examine some of the literary strategies for “living” after death and the potential consequences of those legacies, particularly in some of the works of Italy’s Three Crowns. This chapter focuses on the authorial aims of being remembered after death, and in this way remaining vital in the minds of future generations. Most basically, writings can perpetuate the memory of their subjects, as well as that of the authors themselves, even after the authors’ physical deaths. It was not uncommon for Italian Renaissance authors to take the task of the author a step farther, by portraying the spirit of a literary predecessor as encouraging the writing process in some way: advocating a revised edition, promoting a new translation of a work, or offering a stamp of approval of a new version of the predecessor’s

Rewriting the Auctor

37

text, for instance. In this chapter I examine three distinct examples of these kinds of authorial eidolopoetic narratives. While all narratives featuring the characters of dead spirits by their very nature deal with certain existential questions (life and death, life after death, spirituality, perhaps punishment/reward in the other world, or ethical behaviour in this world with a view to the next one, etc.), authorial eidolopoeia also problematize some particular links between writing and existential values, not least of which is the issue of commemoration. In the first example, Vincenzo Bagli summons the spirit of Boccaccio in order to rededicate a 1506 vernacular translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women, 1374). Bagli presents Boccaccio’s spirit in such a way that the ghost seems to approve not only the vernacular translation, but also a prolongation of Boccaccio’s biographical project to include commemoration of Bagli’s dedicatee, the Perugine noblewoman Lucrezia Baglioni. In other words, Bagli’s example of eidolopoeia serves to have “Boccaccio” praise a lady who lived more than a century after the historical Boccaccio passed away. I shall examine a variety of possible rationales for Bagli’s proemial story, not least of which are to pay homage to Boccaccio, to claim credit for a vernacular translation that was not his own, and to seek to garner favour with a powerful man who would have appreciated commemoration of his relative, Lucrezia. Eidolopoeia prefacing a translation or re-edition of a work can also be very far removed from merely perpetuating or continuing to bring up to date the task of the original text. One example, which represents the spirit of the famous predecessor as radically changed with respect to his historical personal character or identity, is Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of “Petrarch” in Il Petrarcha spirituale (The Spiritual Petrarch, 1536). In this example, the pious friar Malipiero pens a comparatively heavy-handed revision of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Things in the Vernacular, 1342 in its first form, 1374 in its ninth and final reordering by Petrarch).1 Malipiero expunged all of Petrarch’s references to the beloved Laura and substituted what he considered to be more morally edifying verses in praise of Jesus or divine love. Malipiero framed his rewritten lyrics with a series of writings (a prose tale, plus two of his own sonnets) featuring the spirit of a radically repentant Petrarch, portrayed as begging for, then approving of, the friar’s revisions. The drastic change that Malipiero’s project imposes on both Petrarch’s poetry and Petrarch’s character (as it is understood from Petrarch’s own letters and autobiographical writings, to say nothing of testimonies by his living contemporaries) raises an issue that merits

38

Speaking Spirits

consideration: who has the authority to determine the identity of the historical dead person? The final example of eidolopoeia examined in this chapter presents a somewhat more cautionary – but no less bewildering – message about the uses of the rhetorical figure. Florentine humanist Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423–1497) confronts the scholar’s dilemma of not having sufficient (or not sufficiently reliable) biographical information about the object of his study, poet Guido Cavalcanti (1250s–1300). Manetti figures a spirit of Cavalcanti that exhorts Manetti to disregard ghost fictions and to base his scholarship on other sources held to be more reliable or rigorous, such as the poet’s own texts or the research of approved scholars of secondary sources. Manetti’s text implies a puzzling paradox: in it, a ghost advises its addressee not to take into account information that might be articulated by means of a ghost. Vincenzo Bagli’s “Boccaccio”: Still without (Eternal) Rest in Praising Ladies The humanists’ dream to continue to “live” after death through written works and to create a lasting memorial of their subjects reappears in various forms in subsequent narratives featuring authorial spirits. One instance is the 1506 edition of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, edited by Vincenzo Bagli.2 Unlike in his work De casibus, Boccaccio in De mulieribus does not imagine conversations between a living author and the parading spirits of the illustrious dead. In fact, there are no imagined dialogues with spirits in Boccaccio’s original catalogue of famous women. Eidolopoeia does not emerge in De mulieribus until Bagli’s early sixteenth-century version of the work, when Bagli figures a conversation with the spirit of the original author in the proem to the revised edition. Boccaccio’s original work (“the Latin collection of apparently celebratory biographies”)3 was written as one book containing 106 chapters, plus a dedication, preface, and conclusion, all in Latin prose.4 His relatively self-contained biographies of ladies vary in length from two sentences (i.e., “X: De Lybia regina Lybie” “Libya, Queen of Libya” on pages 50–1 in Virginia Brown’s edition and English translation) to thirtytwo sentences (“CV: De Cammiola Senensi Vidua” “Camiola a Sienese Widow,” 454–67). Boccaccio dedicated to Andrea Acciaiuoli this pioneering work devoted exclusively to the biographies of women. Bagli presents Boccaccio’s work in an unattributed vernacular translation,

Rewriting the Auctor

39

appending to it a series of paratexts:5 an unattributed woodcut illustration of the triumph of Fame, plus two sonnets and a prose dedication to Lucrezia Baglioni of his own composition. Since it is in the prose dedication that Bagli figures his conversation with the spirit of Boccaccio, I shall begin there. Bagli opens his edition by recalling the words of Roman historian Sallust – “Omnia orta ocidunt & aucta senescunt” (2r; All things are born to die, and those that grow, get old) – but he also understands that written accounts of mortals’ lives permit them to continue to live in the minds of subsequent generations. He grieves that Lucrezia, who had “tanti probi e sanctissimi costumi, e … tante varie e inumerabile virtu” (2r; so many prudent and very wise habits and many varied and innumerable virtues), would not live on in memory as long as such personages as “Priamo, Nestore o Titone” (2r; Priam, Nestor, or Tithonus). This thought causes his wearied mind much anguish and pain, which sleep eventually overcomes. Bagli reports that he then saw in a vision a figure that spoke to him, taking him to task: “O quanto Vincentio mio sei in grandissimo errore credendo questa tua anzi nostra illustre e diva madonna possa dopo el fatal corso de la sua longa vita senza nome e fama preterire” (2v; O, my Vincenzo, how great is your error, thinking that your, no, our illustrious and bright lady can perish without name or fame after the fateful course of her long life). Bagli thus makes it appear that Baglioni is remembered not merely by turn-of-the-sixteenth-century writers, but by the likes of the “immortal Boccaccio” as well. The spirit continues, stating that if Helen and Europa, the Roman Lucretia, as well as Virginia, Artemisia, Antonia, Hortensia, and Proba, were all remembered for single virtues, surely Lucrezia Baglioni, in whom all the virtues are present, would outshine them all. The dedication bursts with fulsome praise of the lady of Perugia, whose fame seems in the end to have largely met the fate that poor Bagli feared: oblivion. Boccaccio’s spirit laments, “Quanto me doglio io non esser nato a questa felice & aurea eta de haverla possuta cognoscerla. O almancho dapo de lei, aciò ch’io havesse possuto le sole egregie virtu e ornamente intendere e dapoi descriverle” (3r; How sorry I am not having been born in this happy golden age so that I could have known her – at least to have lived after her – so that I could have understood and described her great virtues and beauty). Boccaccio, who identifies himself only through his authorship of De mulieribus claris, orders

40

Speaking Spirits

the character of Vincenzo to dedicate the new edition of the work to Lucrezia: Voglio che quella opera Da claris mulieribus da me composta e intitulata a madona Giovanna la quale longo tempo e stata incognita & occulta, non confidadose a palesare temendo le censura de i maligni e de i detractevoli homini a lei [Lucrezia] per te [Vincenzo] sia intitulata, acio che sotto l’ombra del suo optimo iudicio da ogni invido e laceratore sia diffesa e sicura. (3r) I want you, Vincenzo, to dedicate to Lucrezia that work De mulieribus claris, written by me and once dedicated to Lady Giovanna, which has for so long been hidden and unknown. Do not hesitate out of fear of the censures of malignant and envious men to make it known, since in the shade of her highest judgment it will be defended and secure from every envious and destructive remark.

After uttering the words of dedication, the spirit of Boccaccio immediately disappears, and Bagli awakens from his sleep. Bagli states that he subsequently realized that he had just seen the spirit of Boccaccio in his vision. He then proceeds to locate a copy of De mulieribus claris and to do as that author’s spirit had commanded him. So, one might wonder, what is Bagli’s purpose for invoking the spirit of Boccaccio? Of course, it is a clever narrative ploy demonstrating that Bagli was familiar with Boccaccio’s own use of eidolopoeia in his works. In this respect, Bagli’s instance of eidolopoeia pays homage to Boccaccio: the emulation of an authorial model serves to maintain the predecessor’s work as just that (a model worthy of emulation). Bagli is also able to leverage the authority of a canonical author to speak on behalf of a new edition and rededication of the earlier work, changes that nevertheless do something a little different from merely paying homage. Bagli may also view the authority of the spirit (Boccaccio) as potentially helpful in mitigating the envy or “mordacità e censura” (biting criticism and censure) that he believes his new edition may attract. Certainly there are always critics of another’s work – then, as today – and, given that Bagli does not identify a particular basis for this criticism, perhaps his expressed trepidation is simply generic or formulaic. Nonetheless, there are at least two potential reasons that I believe might warrant critique. The first possibility is in the selection and justification of his dedicatee, since there is considerable discrepancy between Bagli’s praise of Lucrezia Baglioni (as the possessor of all of the virtues of the famous

Rewriting the Auctor

41

classical ladies he lists) and her relative historical obscurity.6 She is identified as “figliola del magnifico Signore Ridolpho dei Baglioni” (the daughter of the magnificent lord Rodolfo Baglioni). According to the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Rodolfo Baglioni had ten children, including Lucrezia, who became the wife of Camillo Vitello. Rhiannon Daniels also notes in her study: The Baglioni were a noble family, which by the end of the fifteenth century ruled Perugia in all but name, until 1540 when Pope Paul II finally dismantled their houses. Lucrezia’s husband, Camillo Vitelli, also belonged to an important Umbrian family, and Camillo’s father, Niccolò, spent the second half of the fifteenth century attempting to establish himself as the unofficial signore of Città di Castello. This led to Camillo’s capture by papal troops in 1484, and Niccolò’s subsequent decision to go into exile. However, after Niccolò’s death in 1486, his sons returned to prominent positions in the city. (Boccaccio and the Book, 159)

Bagli’s personal connection to the Baglioni family remains uncertain, though Daniels hypothesizes that Bagli may have served in Niccolò’s retinue (155). Perhaps in Bagli’s anxiety concerning the reception of his work may be the fear that the discrepancy between his praise of Lucrezia and her relative obscurity might invite from his readers dismissal, if not ridicule. The second cause for criticism that Bagli may foresee is the recognition by readers that the prose dedication and two sonnets are seemingly Bagli’s only contributions to the re-edition of Boccaccio’s encyclopedic work. The vernacular translation is not Bagli’s.7 The Florentine versione is the product of a merchant named Niccolò Sassetti, who was working from a 1370 vernacular translation made by Antonio Da Sant’Elpidio (also referred to as Fra Antonio di S. Lupidio).8 Moreover, Bagli also misrepresents Boccaccio’s original dedication. In the original Latin De mulieribus claris, Boccaccio had deliberately, even emphatically, dedicated his text to Andrea Acciaiuoli, in a way that Virginia Brown has described as “curious,” betraying what might seem to today’s sensibilities “a certain tactlessness on Boccaccio’s part”: Boccaccio first praised Joanna Queen of Naples as too lofty to be associated with his work and opted instead to dedicate it to Acciaiuoli.9 When Bagli re-edited the work, however, he represented the spirit of Boccaccio as having dedicated his work “a madona giovanna” (to Lady Joanna). Stephen Kolsky can hardly be blamed for the misattribution of Giovanna: “I desire that the work Famous Women, composed by me, be dedicated to Madam

42

Speaking Spirits

Giovanna [Baglioni].”10 Indeed, Bagli pulls a mighty subtle sleight of pen here, and it might be worth pausing to consider why he altered this point. It would be a stretch to assume that Bagli somehow forgot the identity of the original dedicatee. After all, he included Boccaccio’s original dedication in the 1506 edition. Moreover, both Boccaccio and Bagli deliberately called attention to their dedicatee’s names, almost as if they assumed a need for a mnemonic ploy so as not to forget the relatively obscure ladies’ identities. Boccaccio analysed the etymology of Andrea: “cum andres Greci quod latine dicimus homines nuncupent” (“andres being in Greek the equivalent of the Latin word for ‘men,’” 4–5), while Bagli in his second sonnet compared Lucrezia Baglioni to the virtuous classical suicide who shared her first name. The only difference between the two Lucretias, he opined, “e questa/Voi Perusina sete e lei Romana” (3v; is this:/You are Perugine, and she is Roman). In the end, neither writer was very effective in his declared intent: immortalizing the identity of his dedicatee. By Bagli’s time, “Boccaccio” is represented incorrectly as having dedicated the original work to the Queen of Naples; while in Bagli’s case so little is known today of Lucrezia Baglioni that Bagli could be considered derelict in this regard. One hypothesis, and I fear it must remain such, is that in both cases the male writers were concerned more with their male patrons than with their female dedicatees. In Boccaccio’s work, there may be latent traces of this overriding interest in his remark “ac amicorum solatium, potius quam in manum rei publice commodum, libellum scripsi” (“I wrote a slim volume more for my friends’ pleasure than for the benefit of the broader public,” 2–3); the glories of the Countess of Altavilla remain in the background, for instance. Bagli, while he praises Lucrezia Baglioni’s many virtues, does not neglect to emphasize whence they came, presumably from the men closest to her: that is, from her “alta e generosa stirpe” (high and generous ancestry), reiterated and amplified in the words of Boccaccio’s spirit: “costei de generosa stirpe e alta sobole procreata de Troilo, reverendissimo episcopo, e de quello magnianimo, invicto, e glorioso Capitano, Zuan Paulo Baglione, sorella, e donna de quello extrenuo et excellentissimo Capitano, Camillo Vitello” (she of generous ancestry and lofty offspring of Troilus, most reverend bishop, and sister of that magnanimous, peerless, and glorious captain, Gianpaolo Baglioni, and wife of that tireless and most excellent captain, Camillo Vitello). Bagli’s captatio benevolentiae is likely aimed at Rodolfo Baglioni, Lucrezia’s father, who is mentioned in the title of

Rewriting the Auctor

43

the dedication. In fact, many Renaissance proemial narratives featuring the spirit of a famous author seem to have a primary function of captatio benevolentiae, that ploy to garner favour, for instance, by completing a project dedicated to a patron or praising the patron (or somebody close to him/her). In eidolopoeia, the captatio benevolentiae can be articulated by the esteemed spirit character and can thus appear to carry greater weight of authority than it would had such praise come from the mouth of a relatively unknown author, such as Bagli. Bagli shows that he approves and follows the work of his predecessor, Boccaccio, by extending the original project: commemorating another famous lady by recording her virtues. On a fundamental level, Bagli’s work is in the same “spirit,” that is, it continues in the same tone or with the same overarching intent as the original project. Boccaccio’s pre-eminent concern in his encyclopedic works was recording the deeds of famous figures from antiquity and in some cases from among his contemporaries to serve as instructional examples of virtue or vice for his readers, and in the recording of those deeds to secure his own legacy for posterity. Bagli perpetuates this concern for the fame of predecessors and a contemporary lady likely related to his patron, as well as his own ploy for remembrance, through his role in this edition. Bagli emphasizes, as Daniels also indicates in her study, the concern for fame in all the work’s paratexts – the emblem of Fame’s triumphal chariot, the initial sonnet, and the dedication in prose and poetry (the final sonnet “idem Vincentio Bagli ad Dominam Lucretiam,” 3v; The same Vincenzo Bagli to His Lady Lucrezia). Bagli wishes to take advantage of the fame of Boccaccio and his works in order to extend them to himself and his lady. Figuring Boccaccio’s spirit as endorsing this project communicates a lively literary inventiveness. Its captatio benevolentiae flatters his likely patron Rodolfo Baglioni in a way that is one step removed from slavishness, yet readily comprehensible. Within its context, it likely had its appeal. It is far from being the only example of eidolopoeia in which authorial spirits are represented as bestowing a kind of imprimatur on editions or translations of their original texts. By feigning the appearance of a ghost of the work’s original author, Bagli lends greater weight to his project as well as to the object of his dedication. Presenting praise of Lucrezia Baglioni in the context of a dream vision further heightens this aspect, since the dream vision mode is often used to convey “other-worldly truths” (Daniels, Boccaccio and

44

Speaking Spirits

the Book, 161). If subsequent “continuations” of Boccaccio’s project are any indication, Bagli’s procedure of adding contemporary examples of ladies worthy of praise is also a successful one. Giuseppe Betussi effectively seconded Bagli’s project by adding “a number of contemporary women to the edition printed in 1545, which were retained in the editions of 1547 and 1558. Likewise, Filippo Giunti printed Betussi’s translation in Florence in 1596, keeping Betussi’s account of contemporary women, and including yet another new account of both ancient and modern women by Francesco Serdonati” (Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 161–2). Nevertheless, some examples of eidolopoeia do not merely endeavour to endorse or extend the original project, and they do not figure the authorial ghost with the verisimilitude that was considered a necessary feature of eidolopoeia, according to rhetorical treatise writers. One of the more extreme examples of this different approach to eidolopoeia is the following case of Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of the spirit of Petrarch. Girolamo Malipiero’s “Petrarch”: The Author Is Edited together with His Poetry Girolamo Malipiero (also known as Hieronimo Maripetro or Maripietro) was a Venetian patrician and Franciscan priest, who died in 1547. He wrote Il Petrarcha spirituale (The Spiritual Petrarch), which was first published by Marcolino da Forlì in Venice in 1536. The book must have been popular, since it saw various reprintings in Venice, including the 1538 edition published again by Marcolino da Forlì under the auspices of the “Chiesa de la Trinità,” the 1567 and 1575 editions by Domenico Farri, the 1581 editions by Domenico Cavalcalupo and by Andrea Raveoldo, and the 1587 printing by the heirs of Alessandro Griffo (or Griffio).11 The work is not easily defined, though it might perhaps most approximate an adaptation of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.12 On the one hand, given the number of revisions and the radical change in tone and intent of Malipiero’s text, it can certainly not be considered an edition of Petrarch’s work. On the other hand, Malipiero co-opted so much of Petrarch’s poetry that Il Petrarcha spirituale could hardly be called an original work either. It was primarily a moralizing correction of Petrarch’s collection of lyric poetry in which Malipiero rewrote all the poems so that they would praise Jesus or divine love, directed

Rewriting the Auctor

45

to the Virgin Mary, rather than earthly love for Petrarch’s beloved Laura.13 The corrections themselves, which aim to purge the “cose vane & ridicole & favolose, & … amori sconvenevoli, & … cose anchor sozze, inique, & scelerate” (6r; the vain, ridiculous, and fictional things, and … the unfitting loves, and … those things that are also dirty, wicked, and wretched), correspond precisely to every expectation of the selfappointed reformer in priestly habit. In order to give the reader an understanding of the revisionary procedure that Malipiero imposed on Petrarch’s lyric poetry, I cite as an example Petrarch’s lovely opening sonnet, “Voi, ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono” (You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound). Petrarch’s version, here from the excellent bilingual edition by Robert M. Durling, reads: Voi, ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore, quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono: del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno. You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now: for the varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow, where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon. But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within; and of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream.14

46

Speaking Spirits

Petrarch’s love (“amore,” line 7), which the historical poet set out to describe in all of its complexity, including – but not limited to – what it shares with “core” (heart), “errore” (error), and “dolore” (sorrow), becomes in Malipiero’s version a much simplified target: vain desire and fleeting love. In this way Malipiero claims to correct the sonnet, so that it now reads (9r, followed by my English translation): Voi, ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono De’ miei novi sospir; ch’escon dal core Per la memoria di quel cieco errore; Che mi fe’ in parte altr’huom da quel, ch’i’ sono; Poi che del vario stil più non ragiono, Ma piango il fallo mio pien di dolore, Il van desir, e ’l fuggitivo amore, Pietà, prego vi mova a mio perdono. Conosco ben, sì come al popol tutto Materia fui d’error: onde sovente Di me medesmo meco mi vergogno. Hora, drizzato al ciel, spero far frutto Di vero ben; ch’io veggio chiaramente, Che quanto piace al Mondo è breve sogno. You who listen in scattered rhymes to the sound Of my new sighs that come from the heart Due to the memory of that blind error That made me in part another man from that one that I am; Since in the varying style I no longer reason, But weep, full of pain, for my fault, The vain desire and the fleeting love, Let pity, I pray, move you to pardon me. I know well, like everyone else, I was the subject of my error: whence often I am ashamed of myself. Now, directed toward heaven, I hope to provide fruit Of the true good; since I can see clearly That what pleases the World is a brief dream.

Memory no longer refers to the sweet experience of youth or a love prior to Laura’s passing. In Malipiero’s recasting of it, memory

Rewriting the Auctor

47

becomes a part of the fictional dead spirit’s reflection on its historical life. The “memory” becomes, in other words, an implicit indictment of Petrarch’s actual life and poetic legacy. Malipiero levels this criticism while maintaining the same rhyme scheme adopted by his predecessor – indeed he retains the final word of each verse in this and in all of the poems that Petrarch composed. At the same time, the zealous friar distorts Petrarch’s meaning and flattens the compelling psycho-spiritual tension that Petrarch had established throughout his Canzoniere. This sonnet marks from the outset the key intent of Malipiero’s project: to make an example out of the much-admired Petrarch. In an age of Petrarchism, and especially the reigning vogue of imitating Petrarchan style, symbolism, or poetic tropes, Malipiero signals his purpose of using a repentant “Petrarch” to harvest “fruit/of the true good,” that is, to become an exemplum of the love poet whose emulators in verse, Malipiero implicitly hopes, will persist in imitating also the spirit’s conversion to a more pious and religious life.15 Il Petrarcha spirituale is particularly relevant to an examination of eidolopoeia because Malipiero prefaced his pious censorings with a prose dialogue between two characters: an eponymous character Malipiero and the spirit of Petrarch. The dialogue (which spans folios 2r–8r) is set in a wooded area near Petrarch’s tomb in Arquà16 and seems primarily intent on establishing Malipiero’s qualifications and authority for his undertaking, but it also contains sharp critiques of the direction of literary studies in Malipiero’s era, as well as a not-soveiled disparaging of the moral compasses of Cinquecento literary patrons. In the proem Malipiero offers thanks to God after he is finally able to visit Petrarch’s tomb and see the study where Petrarch completed his final works. Suddenly he sees something – he knows not what – coming very quickly towards him. This “persona” seems by its appearance to be “più, che humana, et di honore & veneratione degna” (2r; more than human and worthy of honour and veneration). The spirit greets him using the familiar “tu” form (which Malipiero will echo) by saying “Dio ti salvi o Maripetro” (2r; God save you, o Malipiero). Malipiero returns the greeting and inquires how the stranger knows his name. He also wants to know if what he sees is a “spirito fantastico, o pur huomo vero” (2r; a fantastic spirit or rather an actual [living] man). The spirit replies, “Huomo vero gia fui, per natione Thosco, christiano per

48

Speaking Spirits

religione, poeta per professione di lettere, in Campidoglio di lauro coronato; et quivi in Arquà, dopo molti studii, spogliato della vita mortale” (2r–v; A living man I was once, Tuscan by nation, Christian by religion, poet by profession of letters, crowned with the laurel on Campidoglio, and here in Arquà, after many studies, stripped of my mortal life).17 Though the spirit does not name himself, Malipiero recognizes the spirit of Petrarch and asks him what he is doing in this place. Malipiero learns that divine justice demands that Petrarch’s spirit remain there until his collection of love sonnets and songs in the vernacular is properly revised. Malipiero’s character feigns not understanding the objection to Petrarch’s poetry, since he believes that “sotto velame di non so che madonna Laura” (2v; under the allegorical veil of some Lady Laura), Petrarch figured Wisdom, a worthy object of man’s love, so the verses and songs of love must have allegorical and spiritual significances. Petrarch’s spirit expresses wonder at this contention, given his own confessions while alive of his youthful errors, and in his Epistola posteritati his admissions that out of vanity and blindness he laboured after “acerrimo amore” (a most bitter love). The character Malipiero then takes on a confessor’s role, strongly rebuking “Petrarch” for permitting his poetry to be published if he knew that such a book would bring only “scandolo et cattivo essempio” (3r; scandal and a bad example). Indulgently, Malipiero excuses Petrarch, saying that the poet could not have foreseen that his poetry, which he refers to as “le tue vanità” (your vanities), would become even more frequently read, commented, and studied than Christ’s Gospel (“più lette, commentate, et studiate, che ’l Vangielo di Christo,” 3v). Malipiero inquires why, since Petrarch’s burial precisely 151 years and eleven days ago, Petrarch has not made the corrections himself, thereby putting his affairs in order. “Petrarch” cuts short Malipiero’s ceremonious finger-wagging with the simple question: “Non puoi considerare, che tale potenza non sia in me?” (3v; Can you not consider that such a power is not in me?). Malipiero learns that Petrarch’s soul does not have the power to seek its own well-being: as a spirit without a body, it lacks the bodily instruments (“stromenti corporei,” 3v) to make the necessary corrections. When Malipiero argues that the spirit seems to have a body just as real as his own, “Petrarch” counters that, though it may seem so, it is merely an airy body (“corpo aereo,” 3r–4v), and all that God permits it to do is to be seen and heard. The spirit of Petrarch claims to be unable to see

Rewriting the Auctor

49

colours, or to hear any sound except speech, because the ghost’s only perception comes from the intellect, not the “potentie sensitive” (4r; sensorial powers), from “veri organi corporei” (4r; true body organs), which the spirit lacks. Furthermore, given that the spirit is outside time, it cannot itself produce any worthy act, as this one would be – reforming the inappropriate material of his verse: “non essendo io più viatore, ma fuori di spatio temporale, non posso produrre, atto alcuno meritevole, come sarebbe questo, di ritrattare la sconvenevole materia de gli predetti miei versi” (4r; given that I am no longer a traveller [along the way of life], but rather am outside temporal space, I cannot produce any worthy act, as this one would be, of reworking the inappropriate material of my aforementioned lyrics). Malipiero objects that requiring a spirit to do something quite impossible for it would mean that God’s divine sentence would be unjust, a conclusion that both characters find inconceivable. Instead, he comes to learn that God displays His mercy and wisdom by permitting a living person to pay the spirit’s debt by rewriting the offending poetry. Malipiero marvels that no living poet before him has already made the necessary changes. “Petrarch” hopes Malipiero will finally do so and thus make him “Petrarcha theologo & spirituale” (4v; a theological and spiritual Petrarch), in this way satisfying the obligations of the spirit’s long penance in Purgatory. Malipiero then cites various practical reasons that a spiritualized canzoniere would not be a successful publication: (1) Nobody would read it, since the works that are published and sold in Malipiero’s day are those that satisfy human beings’ natural concupiscence and animal appetites (5v); and (2) they would never find a worthy patron and dedicatee for a spiritualized canzoniere. Petrarch’s spirit expresses astonishment at the notion that the Tuscan Muses in Malipiero’s day are held in such contempt because too many lustful men have dressed them up in prostitutes’ clothes: “Hor sappi, che da’ lascivi huomini esse [Muse Thoscane] son travestite, anzi mascherate come di habito meretricio, di modo, che altro non cantano, che cose vane and dishoneste” (5v). Since readers’ appetites in Malipiero’s day call for “cose vane & ridicole & favolose, & di amori sconvenevoli, & di cose anchor sozze, inique, & scelerate” (6r; vain, ridiculous, and fanciful things, and inappropriate love stories, and other things that are filthy, evil, and wicked), nobody would read a spiritual and theological version of Petrarch’s poems, according to Malipiero. Petrarch’s spirit recommends that they not consider that

50

Speaking Spirits

massive “schiera de gli sciocchi” (throng of fools): “Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda & passa” (Let us not speak of them, but look and pass on).18 Finally, the two interlocutors agree to dedicate the revised work to Jesus Christ, since God, who alone matters in this case, must be satisfied. God will release “Petrarch” from his ghostly exile and reward Malipiero for his charitable sacrifice. The two figures conclude by commending each other to God, and the proemial dialogue comes to a close. The spirit of Petrarch in Malipiero’s work has a crucial role. Perhaps most obviously and importantly, “Petrarch” must be the one to request and approve the corrections to the original love poetry. Amedeo Quondam rightly points out that Malipiero’s procedure mimicked the donec corrigatur method of the Inquisitional censor, even though in 1534 “l’indice dei libri proibiti non è ancora pronto” (Il naso di Laura, 206; the Index of prohibited books is not yet ready). Quondam specifies, “La sequenza argomentativa di Malipiero è tutt’altro che capziosa: si fonda, invece, sulle procedure collaudate da secoli nelle pratiche censorie dell’emendazione, e deve, pertanto, avere il consenso dell’autore del testo da emendare” (209; The progression of Malipiero’s argument is not at all capricious; it is based instead on procedures followed for centuries in the censorial practices of textual emendation, which must have the consensus of the author of the text to be emended).19 As part of the emendation process, Malipiero determines to erase the geographical and autobiographical specificity contained in the poems. Quondam rightly calls Malipiero’s objective “consapevole e premeditato” (205; knowing and premeditated), aiming for: l’annullamento radicale della presenza del soggetto dell’enunciato, riconoscibile e riconosciuto in quanto Francesco (e quindi del destinatario assoluto della sua comunicazione amorosa, Laura), e la sua trascrizione rigorosa nei termini di un nuovo soggetto, generico e collettivo al tempo stesso, in quanto riferibile all’universo non individuato (innominato) dell’insieme dei cristiani, dei fedeli. (205) the radical negation of the presence of the speaking subject, recognizable and recognized as Francis (and hence the absolute addressee of his love communication, Laura), and his rigorous transcription of the terms of the new subject, generic and collective at the same time, in as much as it can refer to the unindividuated (unnamed) universe of all Christians, of all the faithful.

Rewriting the Auctor

51

Quondam argues (224ff) that Malipiero adopted a form of Petrarchism in his rewriting of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, while essentially trying to destroy it from within by erasing its historicity and individual self-expression and substituting an a-geographical, atemporal updated handbook of prayer, on the model of Fior di virtù (Flower of Virtue) or Meditazioni sulla vita di Cristo (Meditations on the Life of Christ). In order to do so, Malipiero compels his spirit of Petrarch to denounce allegorical readings of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.20 Part and parcel of the erasure of allegorical interpretations is the radical restructuring of the canzoniere. Malipiero makes a significant structural change to the collection of lyric poetry as well: he separates Petrarch’s sonnets from the canzoni and lyrics in other metres. The opening Petrarchan sonnet discussed above follows a dedicatory poem to Jesus. After “Voi che ascoltate,” Malipiero lists the other 316 sonnets of the collection, separating out the canzoni, which he introduces with an “ammonitione di F. Herionymo Maripetro minoritano” (A Warning by the Friar Minor Girolamo Malipiero) at folio 89r, which reads as something of a sermon against interpreting poetry in a lustful manner. At folio 97v Malipiero includes a sonnet titled “Il Petrarcha agli animi gentili” (Petrarch to the Noble Souls), which he ventriloquizes in the voice of “Petrarch,” followed by Petrarch’s rewritten canzoni. Of course, Malipiero likely separates these poems by form and includes a special warning before the canzoni because he believes canzoni to be associated with lascivious subject matter.21 Nonetheless, in separating the sonnets and canzoni, Malipiero takes away a strong original impetus to the divine that Petrarch suggested through his numerological symbolism. Petrarch the poet mixed together 365 sonnets and canzoni – one for each day of the year – plus one poem in praise of the Virgin Mary, traditionally interpreted as the final transcendence of temporality or mortality.22 Malipiero’s arrangement consists of 317 sonnets, then 48 canzoni, then an “Epilogo alle laudi della Beata Vergine” (154r; Epilogue in Praise of the Blessed Virgin). In other words, Malipiero seems paradoxically to have undermined perhaps the most obvious formal indication of Petrarch’s original impetus towards the divine in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. At the end of the table of contents on folio 161r, Malipiero includes a second “dialogue,” this time between some anonymous critics and Petrarch’s spirit and written as a sonnet, “Collocutori critico et Petrarcha,” in which unnamed critics inquire of “Petrarch” why he has become so happy. The spirit replies: “Mercè del dotto & saggio Maripetro;/Che d’amor vano, & grave error m’ha sciolto” (Thanks to the

52

Speaking Spirits

learned and wise Maripetro;/Who from my vain love and grave error freed me). Here Malipiero the author pays himself a compliment by feigning acknowledgment and praise from the authoritative spirit. One might say that his wishful thinking persists also in the representation of his critics as so easily won over by the spirit’s happy assertions that Malipiero has freed him to sing of divine love, rather than his previous earthly delirium. In the end, Malipiero’s use of Petrarch’s spirit appears even more strained than many other ultimately unconvincing eidolopoetic narratives. Nevertheless, Malipiero’s use of eidolopoeia can serve as an illustrative example of how the words of an authoritative spirit can serve a writer’s or editor’s advantage, much more so than having a text without an interlocutor or positing the figure of another living interlocutor (as, for instance, in many Renaissance dialogues). If Malipiero, religious zealot for the censorship of “lascivious” lyric poetry, were simply to publish his own rewritten spiritualized version of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (sans the spirit of Petrarch), he likely would be considered a presumptuous nobody who understands nothing of lyric poetry. After all, the most successful imitations of Petrarchan verse (especially Pietro Bembo’s) embraced the potentials of the mode to express the sentiments and physiological effects of earthly love. Moreover, the effect would also not be the same if, instead of Petrarch’s spirit, a living confrère prefaced Malipiero’s spiritualized version with the recommendation that this new publication be preferred to the poems of lust, pride, and other sins contained in Petrarch’s original. Nor would the effect be as powerful if a living scholar of poetry prefaced Malipiero’s edition with compliments on the rewriter’s talent for transforming Petrarch’s meaning.23 Malipiero’s proemial dialogue thus presents an example of ecclesiastical censorship in which an imprimatur of sorts must be provided in the voice of the dead author. Using the idol as a mouthpiece, Malipiero presents more authoritatively his (perhaps very questionable) credentials as editor of Petrarch’s collection of poetry, while feigning that praise for his work is not personally boastful. Malipiero’s project certainly gives the impression that he was very earnest in his desire to dictate proper comportment, to provide edifying reading material, and otherwise to draw his contemporaries closer to God. Nevertheless, various venomous writings published in the wake of Malipiero’s work suggest that the feigned compliments of Petrarch’s spirit were, perhaps not surprisingly, ineffective as a protective amulet against the arrows shot by critics. Historians and

Rewriting the Auctor

53

biographers, including Giovanni degli Agostini, noted that Malipiero “menava vita religiosissima” (Malipiero lived a very religious life).24 Degli Agostini continued: “La pretesa dunque di questo religioso Autore, altra non fu, senza dubbio, che di ridurre il Canzoniero del Petrarca allo spirituale, tramutando quelle cose soltanto, che ragionano di vano amore, servando sempre tutte le desinenze usate, e interi eziandio salvando tutti que’ versi, che opposti non erano al divoto suo intento” (444; Thus the aim of this religious author was no doubt none other than to make Petrarch’s Canzoniere spiritual, transmuting only those things that treat of vain love, while using all of the typical modes and salvaging intact all those verses that are not opposed to his devotional intent). Among Malipiero’s primary detractors were Giovanmario Crescimbeni, Giraldi Cintio, and Niccolò Franco. An excerpt of Giraldi Cintio’s acidic comment from the Discorso intorno al comporre dei Romanzi; delle Commedie e della Tragedie, e di altre maniere di Poesie (Discourse concerning the Composition of Romances, Comedies, and Tragedies, and the Styles of Poetry, on page 444 of Notizie istorico-critiche) serves as the epigraph of the present chapter, and his acerbity elicited from degli Agostini this pious retort: “Noi non sapremmo qual fosse il vero motivo di un tal dileggio, avendo F. Girolamo, come uomo di Chiesa, posto interamente il suo studio, onde togliere tuttociò, che d’inciampo alla pietà incontrar si potesse nel Canzoniere, e rimettere altresì tuttociò, che a spirituale vantaggio conosceva esser d’uopo” (444–5; We have no idea what the real motive of such a rant was, since Father Girolamo, as a man of the Church, posited as his sole purpose to take away all that might be found to be an obstacle to piety in the Canzoniere, and to put back all that he believed necessary to spiritual advantage). Franco’s attack on Malipiero was just as sharp. Niccolò Franco (1515– 1570) was a poet whose works included Tempio di Amore (Temple of Love, 1536) and who served as secretary for Pietro Aretino during the crucial years of the preparation of Aretino’s first book of letters between 1538 and 1540.25 According to Charles Davis, when Franco prepared to publish his own book of letters, Aretino blocked its publication with his publisher, Francesco Marcolini: “The enmity engendered by this conflict ended in a bitter feud between Franco and Aretino, and in mid-1539, led to Franco’s departure from Venice” and the pursuit of the publication his own book of letters with Antonio Gardane.26 Most of Franco’s letters are addressed to his contemporaries, from people of the highest socio-political status to prostitutes. But he does address one letter to the

54

Speaking Spirits

long-deceased “Petrarch,” comparing his procedure to Petrarch’s own letter to “Cicero”: La grandissima affettione, che voi portaste a M. Tullio, vi spinse a scrivergli una pistola, in quel mondo dov’era. Onde dal vostro essempio, l’affettion, ch’io vi porto, m’have indutto a scriverne un’altra a Voi, ovunque vi stiate. Benche se voi non pareste scrivere a morto, scrivendo a quel Cicerone, che sempre vive, io anche no paio mandar la mia carta ad huomo sepolto, mandandola a quel Petrarca, che piu vivo che mai. (238v) The very great affection that you bore Tullio prompted you to write him a letter in that world where he was. Whence from your example, the affection that I bear you has caused me to write another to you, wherever you are. Just as you did not seem to write to a dead man, writing to that Cicero, who lives on, I too will not seem to send my page to a buried man, sending it to that Petrarch who lives on more than ever.

Franco distinguishes and takes issue with a particular type of Petrarchista, represented by “coloro, che non sapendo far’altra mostra di loro istessi, gli van togliendo le parolette da i sonetti, e da le canzoni, e facendone i Paternostri, gli van vendendo per robba loro” (238v; those who do not know otherwise how to show something for themselves except by taking some little words from [Petrarch’s] sonnets and canzoni and making Our Fathers out of them and selling them as their own). These types, he continues, not knowing how to be useful in any other way, take up commenting Petrarch’s works, inventing things in order to appear smart and to attract attention, in order to show themselves as wise (239r). “Dico che credendosi parer voi, non solamente si servono del vostro dire, ma dei mezzi versi, de le sentenze, de le inventioni, de gli spirti, e di ciò che havete di buono, e di meglio” (239v; I say that believing themselves like you, not only have they taken over your words, but half-verses, sentences, some inventions, some ghosts, and all that you have that is good). Clearly referring to Malipiero and his work, Franco continues: “Il male è, che ci sono stati di quegli, che v’han voluto far Christiano duecento anni dopo la morte, e di prete v’han fatto frate, ponendovi e cordone, e zoccoli, e scappolare, chiamandovi il Petrarca Sprituale” (240r; The rub is that there are those who have insisted on making you Christian two hundred years after your death, and from priest they have made you a friar, putting the cord, sandals, and scapular on you and calling you the “Spiritual Petrarch”). Franco’s

Rewriting the Auctor

55

accusation against Malipiero is blunt: Malipiero, being incapable of literary achievement in his own right, attempts to seize the poetic limelight for himself by tinkering with the poetry of Petrarch, a dead poet no longer in a position to defend himself and his works. At this point, a comparison between Malipiero’s procedure and that of a Florentine forerunner might be helpful. I believe that the Petrarcha spirituale wanted to mimic other Renaissance poetic rewritings in praise of divine love, such as Girolamo Benivieni’s Commento sopra a più sue canzone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza Divina (Commentary on His Various Songs and Sonnets on Love and Divine Beauty, 1500), which aimed to correct what Benivieni came to believe were the shameful verses in his own 1489 lyric collection, titled Canzone e Sonetti di Girolamo Benivieni fiorentino: Come, dove, quando e di cui prima se inamorò, et quale fructo ne seguitasse (Songs and Sonnets by Girolamo Benivieni the Florentine: How, When, Where, and with Whom He First Fell in Love and the Outcome of It).27 In the wake of a profoundly personal conversion prompted by Girolamo Savonarola’s strident calls for repentance in 1490s Florence, Benivieni wished to recall and to burn in a bonfire of the vanities all of the copies of his youthful poetry in praise of earthly love. Eventually recognizing the impossibility of such an undertaking, he opted instead to issue a new and (morally) improved version of the work, now corrected to praise divine love and beauty: “Se o revocare o altrimenti che con la expositione e publica copia delle altre cose nostre havessimo in alcuno modo potuto supprimere, non mi era hora necessario affaticare un’altra volta la inepta e ad questa mia nuova impresa per sè poco sufficiente penna” (If we had been able to revoke or to suppress our things in some other way than with their exposition and public circulation, it would not be necessary for my inept and insufficient pen to undertake again now this new endeavour).28 Benivieni understood this work as a penance, and he saw that there needed to be a correspondence between the public nature of his earlier sin in circulating poems encouraging concupiscence and a public acknowledgment now of his sin in the form of a revised edition: “Della emendatione del quale errore conoscendo io essere e a Dio e a qualunche altre debitore, né altrimenti satisfare potendo publicamente hora in me la sua copa reconosco, e per questo a la infinita bonità e clementia di Dio supplice recorrendo” (3r; For the emendation of such an error [not only gathering together in a collection his poems of earthly love, but disseminating them in public copies], I recognize that I am in debt to God and to others, and I could

56

Speaking Spirits

not in any other way satisfy this penance than by publicly begging for the infinite goodness and clemency of God now). He also hoped that the revision would not merely revise, but rather entirely supplant the original in the minds of his readers. Malipiero’s revisions, much like Benivieni’s self-commentative emendations in the Commento, drain the poems of their original complexity and raw human sensibilities, making those of Il Petrarcha spirituale (even more than Benivieni made his own) mostly contrived, eviscerated, and sterile rhyming exercises in Christian piety. However, there is an obvious but crucial difference between Benivieni’s procedure and Malipiero’s: in Benivieni’s case, he was determined to revise his own poems, while Malipiero was appropriating somebody else’s work. Selfcorrection is a fundamentally different matter from imposing one’s ecclesiastical power on the libero arbitrio of another, in this case a dead poet with profoundly different sensibilities. While Malipiero might have been genuinely dismayed by the spiritual degradation of his day, what is one to make of an earnest friar who nevertheless presented to his readers a deliberately distorted account of Petrarch? In inventing the narrative about Petrarch’s spirit, perhaps Malipiero believed that his ends justified the means.29 It might seem unfair to level the literature-is-lying charge against this storyteller when Malipiero was doing what many other authors also did – adopting the trope of eidolopoeia. But is there perhaps more at stake for a project in which the author emphasizes his status as a hyper-religious friar and dedicates his labour directly to Jesus Christ as the only worthy dedicatee for his invention? Trust in Malipiero’s currency seems to depend on maintaining the faith of his audience, and surely the reader’s recognition of eidolopoeia as an invention would cast some shadow of doubt on the basis for the friar’s ethical authority.30 Not only is Petrarch’s status as great poet important, but so is his status as dead man, since he is made to seem immortal, still speaking from beyond the grave. This point should provoke the question: Who can speak for the dead? One of the key requirements in the traditional definitions of eidolopoeia is that the writer must figure with verisimilitude the spirit of the dead. The spirit must speak in a manner consistent with the way it did as a living person. In Malipiero’s rendering of “Petrarch,” the issue is further complicated, however, by the fiction of spiritual conversion. Conversion is a radical act for the self, since it is a renouncing and recanting of the way it was, what it

Rewriting the Auctor

57

stood for or signified, contrasted sharply with what it is now. An idol of Petrarch that claims to be repentant will be by definition “altr’huom da quel [ch’era]” (a different man from the one he once was). Certainly St Augustine of the Confessions serves as the quintessential exemplar of the changed man. The man he was is dead, and he is reborn in Christ. It may not be incidental that death language occurs in accounts of conversion and the scripts of baptismal and pentitential rites. But conversion, when it is understood as a move from the unknown or the occulted to awareness or a wholeness of revelation, is in some way an extreme act of what happens to human beings all the time: learning. With each new skill, with each step of growth in understanding, with the ongoing development of ideas, an individual matures, and in doing so must shift not only his/her conception of the world, but even more importantly, his/her own self-perception. People tend to see this process as positive, incremental, even accumulating or increasing over a lifetime. All of this helps to make Malipiero’s positing of “Petrarch”’s postmortem conversion potentially verisimilar. In the full(er)ness of time, “Petrarch” finally came to recognize his error (from Malipiero’s perspective) and sought to correct it. From this perspective, it does not matter how different this attitude might be from what readers might think they “know” of Petrarch’s beliefs during his life. Conversion is a radical change in one’s fundamental beliefs, after all. Moreover, Malipiero compels “Petrarch” to express the desire for revisions to the Canzoniere after conversion. In reality, of course, Malipiero the author projects his own ideal “Petrarch” (a different character from the historical man) onto his spirit character. The narrative by means of eidolopoeia only feigns that the conversion is self-initiated by “Petrarch.” Along somewhat the same lines, Teodolinda Barolini points out that Petrarch continued to petition aid from the Virgin Mary in the final poem of his collection, however: [as] Augustine notes, “The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with a full will. For if the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already. It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it.” The logic of conversion is temporal, since conversion is an experience that involves a movement along the arrow of time from a self that is fragmented, changing, and unstable to a self that is whole, unchanging, and still; while the process of achieving conversion may involve much

58

Speaking Spirits backsliding, as Augustine dramatizes in the Confessions, true conversion, once achieved, is by definition a condition from which there is no relapsing.31

In other words, once a spirit is dead and outside of time, it can no more experience conversion, or desire to have its poetry “spiritualized,” as Malipiero suggests, than it could make the changes of its own accord. In Bagli’s proem to his edition of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, the author seems to maintain a higher degree of verisimilitude in the representation of Boccaccio’s spirit. Perhaps not incidentally, Bagli did not change the meaning or intent of Boccaccio’s original text, either, but rather built upon it by extending the work to include more contemporary exempla. Malipiero’s project is a bit different. While the historical Petrarch wrote one poem to the Virgin Mary, the remainder of the 365 lyrics of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta show that his concerns were predominantly not focused on Malipiero’s notion of divine love. That the Venetian priest insists otherwise seems certainly to test the reader’s willingness to allow for reasonable verisimilitude in this instance. The final case study of this chapter presents a spirit whose function defies readerly expectations in a still different way. Antonio Manetti’s Paradox?: Determining the Message of Cavalcanti’s Spirit Already before Bagli and Malipiero invent their visions of spirits to endorse new versions of works, there is at least one instance of eidolopoeia implicitly suggesting caution where imagined communication with spirits is concerned. Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423–1497) provided just such an example in a roughly ten-page text titled Notizia di Guido Cavalcanti (Information Concerning Guido Cavalcanti, c. 1468–9).32 This Notizia originally served as a preface to the collection of Guido Cavalcanti’s poems, commentaries on his canzone “Donna me prega” (A Lady Entreats Me), and observations concerning the poet and his works, by authors ranging from Dante to Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459). The Notizia is just one scholarly work by Antonio Manetti, a veritable Florentine Renaissance Man whose contributions as mathematician, philosopher, architect, and Dante commentator include the texts Uomini singolari in Firenze (Lives of Illustrious Florentine Men); Sito, forma et misura dell ’Nferno

Rewriting the Auctor

59

et statura de’ giganti et di Lucifero (Site, Form, and Dimensions of [Dante’s] Inferno and the Height of the Giants and Lucifer); and the delightful tale known as the Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo (Story of the Fat Woodworker). Republished in 1887,33 the Notizia seems little more than standard epideictic fare, typical of Renaissance dedications. In this case, Manetti praises Guido Cavalcanti in dedicating his edition of stilnovistic poems to Guido’s descendant Giovanni di Niccolò Cavalcanti (1444–1509). Manetti does not spare lavish complimentary comparisons of Giovanni with his famous ancestor in terms of “liveliness, eloquence, humanity, manners, and nobility, among other traits” (“della vivacità, dello eloquio, ma della umanità, della maniera e della gentilezza e di qualunche altra parte,” 175). But this prefatory note deserves a second look, since its message is far from clear and might even present a kind of paradoxical conundrum. The Notizia opens with the author’s explanation in the first person of his motivations for putting together the this edition of and about Cavalcanti’s poems: Essendo istato alcuna volta richiesto da te, nobile e generoso Giovanni, che io mi dovessi affaticare in darti particular notizia di Guido Cavalcanti, famoso tuo consorto, e contemporaneo e familiare del nostro eccellentissimo poeta Dante, diliberai, ben che io mi conoscessi insufficiente a tanto peso, e in tutto mi dispuosi, iusta mio potere, [di ritrovare] la verità della vita sua, sì per compiacerti nella prima domanda … sì eziandio per satisfare alla esortazione del nostro dottissimo platonico, Marsilio Fecino; a’ quali … per molti … intellettuali beneficii, io sono grandemente debitore; e parte ancora per rispetto della eccellenzia e della dignità di colui, del quale m’era data tale commissione. (171–2) Having been asked a few times by you, noble and generous Giovanni, to exert myself in providing you with detailed information about Guido Cavalcanti, your famous relative, and contemporary and companion of our most excellent poet Dante, I determined, though I knew myself to be insufficient such a task, and set out, according to my power, [to find out] the truth about his life, both in order to please you in the first instance … and also to respond to the encouragements of our very wise Platonist, Marsilio Ficino, to whom I am greatly indebted for many … intellectual benefits; but also in part out of respect for the excellence and dignity of him [Guido Cavalcanti], the subject of my commission.

60

Speaking Spirits

This is to say that Manetti declares three reasons for carrying out his project. The first is straightforward: he wishes to please his dedicatee, who has requested it of him. Second, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) encourages him in this regard, and he feels that he owes Ficino for “intellectual benefits” he has received from him. These benefits must certainly have been his friendship, intellectual discussions, and inclusion in some activities of Ficino’s intellectual circles, but they likely also include Ficino’s dedication to Manetti and Bernardo del Nero (1422– 1497) of the vernacular translation of Dante’s De monarchia (On the Monarchy) in 1468.34 The third impetus of Manetti’s project is his own interest in its subject: Guido Cavalcanti. Beginning his research, Manetti quickly recognizes that information on Cavalcanti has long since been obscured or almost entirely lost (“le cose già per lunghi tempi oscurate e quasi in tutto perdute,” 172), and he wonders if this task far exceeds his powers to satisfy it. Falling asleep one night, he experiences a dream vision, which comes to him “circa l’aurora” (172; around dawn), when such dreams were believed to be true or prophetic. A figure appears: poco appresso, per quanto mi rappresentò dipoi la memoria, mi pareva, non so in che modo, essere intra l’aere, intra una nuvoletta astratto e sospeso e lontano da me per lunghissimo spazio, e da non si potere comprendere; perchè quando intra le stelle e quando di sopra di quelle, mi pareva vedere il tuo Guido con lietissima faccia e risplendente; come d’oro brunito e terso; nè per vederlo di lunge, mi pareva scorgerlo meno bene che se da presso gli fussi stato. (172) not so close, in as much as my memory represented it to me, it [the figure] seemed – I do not know how – to be in the air in a little cloud out there, floating, and far away from me in a very great space that one could not comprehend it; because whether among the stars or beyond them, I seemed to see your Guido with a very happy and resplendent face, like burnished and pure gold; nor did it seem to me that seeing him so far away was I able to recognize him less well that if he had been right next to me.

Marvelling greatly at the sight, Manetti strains to see better the figure of the vision, but it advises him thus: Nulla ti gioverà l’efficacia del tuo guardare, nè l’aguzzare delle ciglia per volermi conoscere, conciò sia cosa che tu non possa aver alcuna

Rewriting the Auctor

61

notizia di me, se non per mie scritture, o per memoria che di quelle o di me da alcuni sia stata fatta, o ultimamente per risplendere della mia effigie per avventura in alcuno che ne’ tuoi medesimi dì e insieme con teco vive. (172–3) You will not enjoy greater efficacy in your desire to learn more about me through sight or by squinting your brow at me, since you can only get information about me through my writings, or by the testimonies of them or of me left by others, or lastly through the shining of my features by chance in someone of your day who lives together with you.

The spirit is very specific about these three reliable ways to find information about him: (1) from the writings he left while he was alive, (2) from certain commentaries on his life and works, which the spirit will subsequently list, and (3) through resemblance in his descendants. Recovering from his surprise and awe, Manetti poses a series of four questions to the spirit: Who are you? Are you alive? What did you write, and who contributed to knowledge of you and your works? And what is the basis of your fame in our world? Leaving explicit confirmation of his identity for last, the spirit otherwise responds to Manetti’s questions point by point. The spirit lives, it states, “ma non di quella vita, come disse il nostro incomparabile poeta, che al termine vola, ma di quella che in eterno e sanza fine felicemente si fruisce e gode” (173–4, italics in the original; but not in that life, as our peerless poet said, that flies towards its terminus, but rather in the one that is eternal and rejoices happily and without end). In this way, Manetti associates the living eternal spirit of Cavalcanti with Dante, essentially neutralizing any competing critical perspective that Dante’s act as Prior in 1300 to exile his primo amico to Sarzana, where Cavalcanti contracted malaria, might somehow have sundered the two forevermore. On the contrary, here Manetti has the spirit of Cavalcanti praise Dante as our peerless poet. Manetti, who during his lifetime participated in two of the weightiest literary initiatives of Medicean Florentine patriotism – the Raccolta aragonese and the 1481 edition of Dante’s Divina commedia – was intent here, too, to present a harmonious canonical perspective of Florentine poets, compelling even “Cavalcanti” to accept subsequent critical determinations of Dante’s superiority that were much contested in Cavalcanti’s own day.35

62

Speaking Spirits

The spirit’s next answer also serves Manetti’s purposes. Addressing the question about his writings, the spirit states that they were written in versi materni; e benchè oggi rispetto alla alleganzia della lingua latina e all’ornato del parlare comune, non sieno, fuori che per gravità, molto da ricercare; nientedimeno, per la loro fermezza e verità, sicondo l’oppenione di quelli che voi chiamate dotti e eruditi, non sono inferiori a di quelle di più ornato e di più lustro. (174) verses in the mother-tongue; and though today with respect to the elegance of the Latin language and to the ornate quality of common speech, they are nothing to seek out for any reason other than their gravitas; nonetheless for their solidity and truth, according to the opinion of those whom you call wise and erudite, they are not inferior to those in languages that are more ornate or illustrious.

Manetti, who did not read Latin but had a reputation for being “peritissimo nella lingua toscana”36 (expert in the Tuscan language), has the authoritative spirit exalt the vernacular tongue, which among Florentine humanists of Manetti’s day was considered inferior to Latin. The spirit also provides a specific list of the writers who provided commentaries on his canzone “Donna me prega” (A Lady Entreats Me): Egidio Romano, Dino del Garbo, and Ugo dal Corno. He also lists authors who had other pertinent information about him: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Domenico d’Arezzo, Filippo Villani, Leonardo d’Arezzo, Giannozzo Manetti, Riccardano Malispini, and Giovanni Villani, among others (“e degli altri,” 175). While his poetic production is the basis of Guido Cavalcanti’s fame in Manetti’s day, his image, as well as his liveliness, eloquence, and other qualities, are also reflected in his descendant Giovanni Cavalcanti, Manetti’s dedicatee, and Manetti is able to confirm in the end that the spirit he is addressing is indeed that of Guido Cavalcanti. At this point, the spirit moves as if to depart, but Manetti detains him with two more inquiries. The first eventually concludes with Manetti requesting the spirit to confirm the details pertaining to the Cavalcanti family tree, which he proceeds to present in a few very dense pages on the first known Cavalcanti ancestors, speculation about branches of the family in Cologna, Florence, Valdipesa, Pescia, Siena, and elsewhere. It is as if Manetti the author is presenting at this point his genealogical and

Rewriting the Auctor

63

political research on the Cavalcanti family, and Manetti the character in the Notizia finally asks the spirit to confirm that all he has written is true. Manetti adds that because the spirit looks continuously on the face of God, in which one sees “every truth,” he does not believe that any knowledge is hidden from the spirit, or that the spirit should be disturbed in any way if living people are to have “ferma e certa notizia” (solid and certain knowledge) of Guido and the Cavalcanti family. Immediately, before the spirit can speak, Manetti makes a much briefer second query: “se alla tua passata di questa vita, la donna tua arse tua Trattati e Opere per te composte di filosofia e naturale e morale, come suona ancora alcuna fama” (179; if at your passing from this life, your wife burned the treatises and works you composed on natural and moral philosophy, as one still hears said sometimes)? The spirit of Guido Cavalcanti looks at him attentively while Manetti speaks, but as Manetti’s words end, so too does his vision. Though Manetti lingers in bed, he soon loses every hope of seeing the spirit of Guido Cavalcanti ever again and thus of learning with certainty about his final two requests for information. Manetti therefore sets himself to remembering what the spirit told him and to seeking the sources the spirit cited. He appends these commentaries and testimonies to Cavalcanti’s poems that he has collected, and he ends his Notizia addressed to Giovanni by asking him to bear his work with patience and without admiration, remembering from whom it comes (“sopporterálo con pazienza e senza ammirazione, ricordandoti tu da chi elle vengono,” 180). It is clear from the very beginning of this narrative featuring an authorial spirit that Manetti’s interest, while it might seem rather conventionally aimed at captatio benevolentiae towards his dedicatee, is actually first and foremost a humanistically epistemological one. Manetti’s prose betrays an almost obsessiveness with learning the truth and how truth can be revealed. He mentions the desire to discover the “truth of [Cavalcanti’s] life” (“[ritrovare] la verità della vita sua,” 171) as the reason for undertaking the task of compiling Guido Cavalcanti’s works in the first place. Truth is of recurring interest in the narrative. The spirit praises commentators who display “fermezza e verità” (174; decisiveness and truth). Among the commentators, Domenico d’Arezzo is singled out as not having a true knowledge of Guido’s father (“benché non avessi vera notizia del padre mio,” 175). Manetti wonders at the relationship between popular opinion and truth (“perochè si dice et è opinione di alcuno e forse la verità che …” 176), and concludes his petition to the

64

Speaking Spirits

spirit by reiterating that he asks in order to learn from Guido the truth (“e però desidero d’intendere da te se questo è il vero,” 178). According to an understanding of omniscence present also in Dante’s Commedia, Manetti suggests that, after the spirit’s physical death, it gazes continually into the face of God; that is to say, it sees every truth, so nothing must be unknown or hidden from the spirit (“niente credo che ti sia incognito o nascosto,” 178). Manetti notes that it must therefore be annoying to the spirit that there remains no reliable or certain knowledge about him and his family in Manetti’s time: “né ti debbe esser molesto che di te e de’ tuoi antichi intra noi s’abbia ferma e certa notizia” (178). Earlier in the dialogue, Guido’s spirit told Manetti that his searching and straining to see truth in the figure of his ghostly appearance would come to naught, since the only ways of gaining information about him was through his writings, through those who had left writings about him, or ultimately through his descendants. Manetti struggled throughout his own life to gain knowledge, especially since he did not know Latin and depended on others, including Ficino, to help him understand works written in Latin or other languages besides Florentine Italian. He may also have wrestled with the tension between the truth that is gained through reason and careful study and that which is divinely or mysteriously revealed. Later in his life, Manetti would shift from his interest here in a search for verifiable truth to join the throngs of Florentines who put their faith in Girolamo Savonarola’s fiery sermons. It is significant that in Manetti’s Notizia, however, the author claims to permit no mysterious revelation, but nevertheless finds a ruse for including pages of information that appears to have no other chance at confirmation than the word (never actually granted) by a fictive spirit.37 The pages concerning Cavalcanti’s ancestors in the Notizia are by far the most detailed and may represent the bulk of Manetti’s own research contributions to the “new information concerning Cavalcanti.” What were Manetti’s sources for this information? He does not divulge them, but who more than Giovanni Cavalcanti (or another Cavalcanti relative Manetti may have known personally) might have been versed in this family lore and eager to relate it to a researcher on this famous ancestor? Moreover, is there a more subtle way for Manetti both to satisfy Giovanni Cavalcanti’s request to include all of the “truth” about his family and famous ancestor and to acknowledge from a scholarly perspective that there may be absolutely no factual foundation for any of these claims than by allowing his “vision” to dissolve before the spirit can render his judgment on them?

Rewriting the Auctor

65

Likewise, Manetti leaves open-ended the thorny issue of whether some of Cavalcanti’s works on natural and moral philosophy are missing because his wife burned them – presumably to prevent investigators from finding proof of heterodox beliefs in them and thereby rendering her life more difficult.38 Manetti the author of the Notizia effectively conveys that there may have been other writings, as some people allege, or this view may come from envious people inventing baseless fictions. His procedure seems to suggest critical wariness with regard to other fictions, as well. The message of Manetti’s “Cavalcanti” when he lists the commentaries and other sources for knowledge about his poetry seems to be: Forget about waiting for ghosts to appear as if by magic in your dreams; reliable knowledge comes from rigorous study of texts and sources, and biographical information can come from descendants. The problem is, of course, that Manetti chooses to articulate this message precisely by means of a spirit appearing in a dream vision. “Cavalcanti” in the Notizia is akin to Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher from circa 600 BC to whom is attributed the statement “All Cretans are liars.”39 Aware of the power of a spirit in a dream vision, Manetti turns its use on itself, adopting a spirit narrative to articulate his message: one that conveys humanistic scepticism concerning otherworldly visions. Manetti makes no explicit reference in his Notizia to Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.9, the tale featuring Guido Cavalcanti’s witty remark that silences a group of simpleminded, unlettered men. Nevertheless, the ultimate elusiveness of both Boccaccio’s narrative and the dream narrative of the Notizia makes it difficult not to imagine a loose parallel between the two. In the Decameron story, the narrator Elissa begins by suggesting that the example of a witty retort that she is about to offer concludes with “un sì fatto motto, che forse non ci se n’è alcuno di tanto sentimento contato” (“such a quip that for sheer acumen probably beats any of those hitherto recounted”).40 She recounts a tale in which Guido Cavalcanti one day walking through a cemetery along the Corso degli Adimari is accosted by a group of unlettered men led by Betto Brunelleschi, who want to poke fun at what they perceive to be an antisocial philosopher who has snubbed their company. So they challenge Cavalcanti by saying, “quando tu avrai trovato che Idio non sia, che avrai fatto?” (“When you’ve found out that God does not exist, what will that have got you?”). Cavalcanti deflects their insult by answering, “Signori, voi mi potete dire a casa vostra ciò che vi piace” (“Seeing that here you are at home, my lords, you can say to me what you please”). The quip makes clear that the ignorant (for all of their self-declared belief in God)

66

Speaking Spirits

are at home among the tombs of the dead (and thus understand little of eternal life). Vaulting over a tombstone, Cavalcanti leaves that “home” and Betto to explain the philosopher’s meaning to his gape-mouthed companions. Elissa’s prefatory remark suggests that the reader would be wise not to accept this explanation of a simple unlettered man, but the greater “sentimento” (which, according to Vittore Branca, refers to “tanta sapienza” or “tanto senno,” 753n) remains unclarified. The Notizia, with all of its emphasis on learning “every truth” about Guido Cavalcanti, remains equally reticent. After the spirit provides a tidy bibliography of his life and works, and confirms his identity and resemblance to his descendant Giovanni Cavalcanti, Manetti’s vision disappears before the spirit can respond to Manetti’s ulterior requests for knowledge. A case might be made for consideration of Antonio Manetti’s Notizia di Guido Cavalcanti as a touchstone for later authorial eidolopoeia, such as Ficino’s and Benivieni’s in the next chapter. Manetti’s close personal friendship and intellectual exchange with both Ficino and Benivieni are well documented, and it is unthinkable that Ficino or Benivieni would not have been aware of Manetti’s Notizia. In fact, the authorial visions of both Ficino and Benivieni share Manetti’s primary concerns with the revelation of truth and, to a greater degree in subsequent texts, with the consequences of migration and political exile. (Manetti alludes to the relocations of Cavalcanti family members in the long section about the family’s ancestry, but he does not politicize it in the way that Ficino and Benivieni will. Instead, Manetti seems deliberately to downplay political differences, emphasizing, for instance, “Cavalcanti”’s expressed admiration for Dante and their share in the legacy of Florentine poetry.) But unlike Manetti, Ficino relies entirely on divine revelation in the form of a vision he creates of Dante’s coronation. Benivieni also claims to learn much more from confirmation by the spirit of Dante than Manetti learns from the spirit of Cavalcanti, since Benivieni will not wake from his sleep, as I shall discuss in the next chapter, until after the spirit of Dante upbraids turn-of-the-sixteenth-century Florentines and utters his prophecy for the city’s future. It should be remembered, too, that Manetti was personally involved in the Florentine attempts to repatriate Dante’s bones, penning the 1476 letter addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici reminding him to insist on Dante’s translation from Ravenna. In short, while subsequent writers may have been aware of Manetti’s Notizia, they do not share his pessimism in the rhetorical potential for this form of eidolopoeia – or perhaps, rather than pessimism, I should

Rewriting the Auctor

67

say his insistence on the distinction between knowledge that can be had from reliable textual sources and the words that can be projected into the mouth of a fictive spirit. Summarizing the Concerns of Authorial Eidolopoeia All three of these examples of eidolopoeia focus deliberately on at least some of the tasks of the writer (including understanding the duties and responsibilities of recording the stories of others; researching, editing, or translating texts written by others; and securing the permission or authority to publish one’s work). Bagli, Malipiero, and Manetti, in their inclusion of a narrative featuring a fictive spirit of their original text’s historical author, also fundamentally engage the “spirit” of the original work; that is, Bagli, Malipiero, and Manetti must come to terms – and they do so in differing ways – with the intent or aims of the works they revise. At the same time, these editors end up changing more than the letter of the text; they also change the “spirit” – so to speak – of their original authors; and of the three authors, Malipiero most radically revises not just the text of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta but also “Petrarch,” as represented by the spirit, effectively editing the historical poet’s personal characteristics and other aspects of his identity. Works featuring the spirits of deceased literary luminaries can influence the course of subsequent writings. But Renaissance writers, who emulate, cite, and otherwise pay tribute to their predecessors, also prove that they can rewrite those authors when their masters do not quite embody the desired critical or ideological positions within their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cultural debates or literary tastes. Crafting sophisticated mimesis, layering textuality, and representing canonicity are just some of the ways that these early modern writers attempt to establish writerly authority.41 Storytellers who figure authorial spirits in the form of eidolopoeia add some unique considerations to their establishment of authority. In particular, the spirit, the figure of the storyteller vis-àvis the spirit, and the content of the message reportedly communicated between the two figures influence in a special way the strategies of authority within the example of eidolopoeia. The mode of communicating the message – by means of a spirit invented by the storyteller – frames its reception. The effect of the spirit’s message would certainly be different if the message were articulated by a living rival poet, an allegorical figure, or a fictional character. At first glance, it might seem as if articulation of an important message

68

Speaking Spirits

by means of a spirit would undermine the message’s authority because a ghostly figure makes the message less verifiable (a third party cannot ask the spirit to clarify or elaborate the argument), and therefore less credible. Just the opposite, however, actually seems to be the case: the spirit appears to have more authority, perhaps in part because this speaker, though fictional, is perceived as having more experience: The character of the dead spirit has seen both life and death, while living readers know only their experiences of life. Moreover, the storyteller, by claiming an intermediary role, becomes the privileged percipient of the ghost, as well as the interpreter of its message. As such, the narrator assumes an unusual power, since most people do not claim to communicate with ghosts. The storyteller, in a role similar to a medium, becomes the only one who can report the “spirit’s” message (which is, of course, the message of the storyteller), and, consequently, others are at a comparable disadvantage to challenge the validity of that message. For this very reason, the messages that spirits are created to articulate are frequently controversial or highly subjective. Their judgments or assessments may have no other way of being proven or verified independently. In the face of no other evidence, for instance, ghosts declare that one version of a text is definitive, or they declare that a dead author has approved post-mortem changes to his text. Antonio Manetti, for one, found a way to caution against taking this rhetorical ploy too far, but this form of eidolopoeia was already firmly established and beginning to develop in even more complicated ways.

2 Divining Dante: Scandals of His Corpus and Corpse

INGRATA PATRIA NE OSSA QUIDEM HABEBIS

O ungrateful country, you will not have my bones. – From the epitaph that Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus was said to have dictated for his tomb

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio hardly manage to rest in peace after their deaths in 1321, 1374, and 1375 respectively, at least not according to various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century narratives featuring their ghostly spirits. Instead of basking in God’s one Eternal City, authorial ghosts express concerns about exile and where they have been buried or where their spirits claim currently to reside. At least at some point during their lifetimes the Three Crowns declared themselves to be Florentine, despite the fact that only Dante was born in Florence and could boast of having spent much of his life there. None of the three authors received burial in the city. To this day Ravenna stalwartly guards Dante’s remains, while Boccaccio rests in the Church of Saints Jacopo and Filippo in Certaldo, and Petrarch has his tomb in Arquà, so moving to visitors over the centuries, including Girolamo Malipiero, as witnessed in the previous chapter. In chapter 1, I examined some authorial eidolopoeia that encouraged living writers to do their jobs, that is, to write, edit, or translate texts. In many of those cases, such as the ones presented by Bagli and Malipiero, the spirits of poets past serve to voice the opinions of Bagli and Malipiero, not opinions that might even be considered remotely verisimilar to

70

Speaking Spirits

those held by Boccaccio or Petrarch during their lifetimes. In this chapter, I focus more specifically on the example of Dante. Dante’s spirit is by far the most frequent interlocutor in Italian authorial eidolopoeia of the Renaissance, and his spirit already appears very shortly after his death. The integrity of Dante’s written corpus was in doubt when, according to a legend first forwarded by Boccaccio, nobody could account for the final thirteen cantos of Dante’s Commedia at his death.1 The first tale featuring a speaking spirit of Dante examined in this chapter seeks to explain the completion of Dante’s Paradiso. The central sections of this chapter investigate Florentine attempts to recover Dante’s corpse from his tomb in Ravenna, including narratives by Antonio d’Orsino Benintendi, Marsilio Ficino, and Girolamo Benivieni, who portray the spirit of Dante complaining about his continued exile from his Florentine homeland. These examples serve to illustrate how Dante’s spirit came to be used in attempts to influence political decisions concerning exile and the reintegration of the body politic. Jacopo Alighieri Claims to Speak with His Deceased Father’s Spirit According to Boccaccio’s account in his Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Treatise in Praise of Dante, also sometimes referred to simply as The Life of Dante, composed in three drafts between 1351 and before 1372)2 and the scholarly tradition that followed, it was not clear where the final thirteen cantos of the Paradiso were when Dante died:3 Egli era suo costume, quale ora sei o otto o più o meno canti fatti n’avea, quegli, prima che alcuno altro gli vedesse, donde che egli fosse, mandare a messer Cane della Scala, il quale egli oltre ad ogni altro uomo avea in reverenza; e, poi che da lui eran veduti, ne facea copia a chi la ne volea. E in così fatta maniera avendogliele tutti, fuori che gli ultimi tredici canti, mandati, e quegli avendo fatti, né ancora mandatigli, avvenne che egli, senza avere alcuna memoria di lasciargli, si morì.4 It was [Dante’s] custom, when he had finished six or eight cantos, more or less, to send them, from wherever he might be, before any other person saw them, to Messer Cane della Scala, whom he held in reverence beyond all other men. After [Cangrande della Scala, Lord of Verona] had seen them, Dante would make a copy of the cantos for whoever wished them.

Divining Dante

71

In such wise he had sent Messer Cane all save the last thirteen cantos – and these he had written – when he died without making any provision therefor.

Dante’s surviving family members and his close associates searched carefully through all of his papers and effects for eight months, but failed to find any sign of the Commedia’s finale, the exquisite cantos describing Dante’s ascent with Beatrice through the spheres of Saturn, the fixed stars, and the Primum Mobile, to the ineffable vision of God’s Empyrean. Boccaccio affirmed that Dante’s sons Jacopo and Piero, encouraged by disconsolate friends, attempted to pen an ending to the masterpiece, but they met with no success. One night a “mirabile visione” (485; “remarkable [or wondrous] vision,” 65) came to Jacopo, who was considered the better poet of the two brothers, and it caused them to abandon, in Boccaccio’s words, their “stolta presunzione” (485; “foolish presumption,” 65) to finish their father’s work. That same vision also indicated to Jacopo where he could find Dante’s missing pages of the manuscript. Jacopo purportedly sees Dante in a dream vision one night near dawn when, traditionally, prophetic or trustworthy visions are believed to come. Dante’s spirit is “vestito di candissimi vestimenti e d’una luce non usata risplendente nel viso” (485; “clad in the whitest raiment, and his face shone with unwonted light,” 66). Jacopo asks the figure in the vision if it is still alive, and he learns that his father no longer endures the first (mortal) life. Jacopo continues to question the spirit, asking if Dante has finished writing his masterpiece before passing from this world and, if so, where it is, since no one has been able to find it (“se egli avea compiuta la sua opera anzi il suo passare alla vera vita, e, se compiuta l’avea, dove fosse quello che vi mancava, da loro giammai non potuto trovare,” 485): A questo gli parea la seconda volta udire per risposta: “Sì, io la compie”; e quinci gli parea che ’l prendesse per mano e menasselo in quella camera dove era uso di dormire quando in questa vita vivea; e, toccando una parte di quella dicea: “Egli è qui quello che voi tanto avete cercato.” (485) And again he seemed to hear in answer, “Yes, I finished it.” And then it seemed to him that his father took him by the hand and led him to the room where [Dante] was wont to sleep when alive, and touching a spot there, said, “Here is that for which thou hast so long sought.” (66)

72

Speaking Spirits

Jacopo then awakens from his dream and determines to test the truthfulness of the spirit’s message straight away. So he goes to the house of Piero Giardino, a long-time disciple of Dante, and relates to him his entire vision, entreating Giardino to accompany him to the place indicated by Dante’s spirit to “vedere se vero spirito o falsa delusione questo gli avesse disegnato” (485; “learn whether it was a true spirit or a false delusion that had revealed this to him,” 66). The two men set off together, still before daybreak, according to Boccaccio, to examine the place that Dante’s spirit had indicated: quivi trovarono una stuoia al muro confitta, la quale leggiermente levatane, videro nel muro una finestretta da niuno di loro mai più veduta, né saputo che ella vi fosse, e in quella trovarono alquante scritte, tutte per l’umidità del muro muffate e vicine al corrompersi, se guari più state vi fossero: e quelle pianamente dalla muffa purgate, leggendole, videro contenere li tredici canti tanto da loro cercati. (485–6) They found a matting fastened to the wall. Gently lifting this, they discovered a little opening which neither of them had ever seen or known of before. Therein they found some writings, all mildewed by the dampness of the wall, and on the point of rotting had they remained there a little longer. Carefully cleaning them of the mold, they read them, and found that they were the long sought thirteen cantos. (66)

Jacopo and Giardino have copies made of the pages and, following Dante’s custom, send them first to Cangrande della Scala. According to nineteenth-century scholar Pier Desiderio Pasolini: “Quando, un otto mesi dopo la morte di Dante, come risulta da un sonetto e da un capitolo di Jacopo, la Commedia apparve intiera, i figliuoli ed i discepoli ebbero il senso che Dante fosse risorto!”5 (When some eight months after Dante’s death, as indicated by a sonnet and capitolo by Jacopo, the Comedy appeared whole, his sons and disciples had the sense that Dante was risen from the dead!). Vincenzo Zin Bollettino, an English translator of Boccaccio’s Trattatello, rightly noted, “the whole episode of the dream of Dante’s son Iacopo is given a fantastic, nonrealistic treatment.”6 According to Giuseppe Billanovich, Boccaccio’s anecdote concerning the rediscovery of Dante’s final cantos is the invention of a storyteller influenced not only by classical biographies, but also by the legends of the saints.7 Debates concerning exactly how much material from the Trattatello sprang from the pure fantasy of Boccaccio

Divining Dante

73

closely parallel the notoriously vexata quaestio surrounding the authenticity of the letter to Ilaro in Boccaccio’s Zibaldone Laurenziano, an ongoing critical exchange that exceeds the purview of the present study.8 While the critical bibliography on Boccaccio Dantista is vast – both in quantity and quality – in terms of this question of the Paradiso’s final cantos, the foundation for scholarly facts seems shaky at best. Nevertheless, Giorgio Padoan’s characterization strikes a reasonable balance: Non crederemo, ovviamente, al raccontino agiografico, che discende da tradizione retorica e che è pieno di particolari topici (a cominciare dal mese del ritrovamento: nono dalla morte di Dante). Ma esso, come tutte le storielle, nasconderà pure un fondo di verità: quando Boccaccio scriveva il Trattatello, Pietro Alighieri era ancora vivo e vegeto. Crederemo non al sogno, ma al fatto: l’ultima parte del Paradiso, i canti XXI–XXXIII, era rimasta inedita presso i figli del poeta, che ne attendevano la pubblicazione da colui cui l’intera cantica era stata dedicata. Forse dopo nuove inutili sollecitazioni, rotti gli indugi, attribuendone la volontà al loro stesso genitore “apparso in sogno,” furono i figli a prendere l’iniziativa e a pubblicare con gli ultimi tredici canti, il Paradiso nella sua compiutezza, indipendentemente da Cangrande. Probabilmente in quell’occasione Jacopo inviò a Guido da Polenta, con la copia dell’opera paterna, la sua Divisione ossia il capitolo riassuntivo dell’intero poema, a mo’ di accompagnamento esegetico, il 1° aprile 1322.9 Obviously, we shall not believe [Boccaccio’s] little hagiographic tale, which springs from a rhetorical tradition and is full of topical details (including the month in which the work was found: the ninth after Dante’s death). But like all of Boccaccio’s little stories, this one also hides a grain of truth. When Boccaccio wrote the Trattatello, Pietro Alighieri was still alive and well. We should believe – not the dream – but this fact: the last part of the Paradiso, cantos 21–33, remained unpublished and in the possession of the poet’s sons who expected its publication by the man to whom the entire canticle had been dedicated. Maybe after more useless requests to Cangrande, fed up with his delays, attributing the desire to publish the work to their own father who “appeared in a dream,” the sons themselves took the initiative to publish those final thirteen cantos together with the rest of the Paradiso independently of Cangrande. On the first of April 1322, Jacopo probably sent to Guido da Polenta his father’s work, along with his own Divisione, that is his work summarizing the whole poem as a kind of accompanying exegesis.

74

Speaking Spirits

Padoan’s hypothesis suggests that Dante’s cantos were never missing in the first place. Delays on the part of Cangrande della Scala in the publication process led Dante’s sons to seek an alternate patron in Guido da Polenta, to whom Jacopo sent his exegetical work. Padoan also appears to be discounting Boccaccio’s timeline, since the dates given indicate that just over six months (not eight or nine) would have passed since the poet’s death in September 1321. But is the impetus for Boccaccio’s eidolopoeia so clear? Since at least 1436, when Leonardo Bruni wrote in a prefatory note to his Vita di Dante (Life of Dante) that Boccaccio had composed the Trattatello as if he were composing one of his romances, “tutta d’amore et di sospiri et di cocenti lagrime” (all full of love and sighs and burning tears),10 critics have cast doubt on the historical truth of Boccaccio’s account. Not surprisingly, Bruni did not include any explicit mention of the ghostly vision of Dante in his biography of the poet. In fact, most of the early biographers of Dante left out any mention of the missing cantos of Dante’s Paradiso. One exception was Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459).11 Greatly indebted to both Boccaccio’s Trattatello and Bruni’s Vita di Dante, Manetti’s Vita Dantis (Life of Dante, 1440) “revives all the fanciful accounts that in the course of the Trecento had created a legendary aura around the Florentine poet, starting with the dream of Dante’s pregnant mother,”12 while it follows Bruni’s example in emphasizing the patriotic and civically engaged aspects of Dante’s life. In referring to the dream featuring Dante’s spirit, however, Manetti stated very explicitly his motivation for repeating it. He is citing “proof” for his timeline establishing the length of time Dante laboured on his poem from the point when he circulated the first seven cantos of the Inferno, which is the subject that immediately precedes Manetti’s mention of the missing cantos of the Paradiso: Non multis deinde ante mortem suam diebus ultimas manus divino poemati imposuit absolvitque. Id ex eo constat, quod post obitum suum mirabilia quaedam contigisse dicitur, quae hoc ipsum apertissime declararunt. Nam cum scripta quaedam, in quibus aliquot ultimi Paradisi cantus continebantur, nondum integro volumini apposuisset sed in quodam occulto aedium loco abscondisset, ut forte opportunum componendi tempus praestolaretur, ac per hunc modum opus imperfectum appareret, ecce umbra defuncti poetae Jacopo, cuidam ex filiis suis maiori natu et imprimis de imperfectione operis sollicito atque ansio, in somniis apparuisse fertur; qua quidem visione filium admonitum fuisse dicunt ubi illa ultima

Divining Dante

75

Comoediae scripta abstrusa laterent, ac per hunc modum ab eo postea summo mane quaesita, ut in somniis fuerat admonitus, tandem adinventa fuisse. Se quorsum haec tam multa de huiusmodi somniis dicet quispiam? Ut luce clarius appareat id quod paulo ante expressimus: vigintiquinque circiter annos illud divinum poema fuisse absolutum atque emendatum. It was only a few days before his death that he put the final touches on the divine poem and completed it. The clearest possible evidence of this is offered by the miraculous episodes that are said to have taken place after his death. In fact, he had hidden in a cranny of his house some sheets containing the last cantos of Paradise, waiting for the right time to add them to the rest of the poem – which for this reason seemed still incomplete. The story is told that one night the shade of the dead poet appeared in a dream to Jacopo, his eldest son, who was the person most concerned and anxious to see the poem finished. They say that in the vision the son was told where those last cantos of the Comedy were hidden. Early the following morning he started looking for them and finally found them, exactly as he had been told in the dream. Some may wonder why I speak so much of dreams like this. I do so in order to give the clearest proof of my earlier claim, namely, that it took him about twenty-five years to finish and polish that divine poem. (56–9)13

Manetti’s words seem to suggest that Dante’s delay in sending the last cantos to Cangrande might be a prudent publication strategy (“waiting for the right time to add them to the rest of the poem”). Moreover, Manetti must not have felt it necessary to include a witness (Giardino) in his account of the relocation of the cantos, as Boccaccio did. But Boccaccio’s motivation for initiating the narrative featuring Dante’s spirit remains less clear. Ultimately, Boccaccio’s invention of this vision of a spirit may raise more questions than it is likely capable of answering. But I wonder if in 1322 there may have been some doubt concerning the authenticity of those thirteen cantos. Boccaccio’s account suggests, in fact, that Dante’s sons had been encouraged to complete Dante’s masterpiece. It is not inconceivable to imagine that in a significant period of six to nine months the sons, or perhaps other disciples or admirers of Dante’s work, were beginning to sharpen their quills. Although there is no evidence that competing drafts of the end of the Paradiso ever existed, it may be that Boccaccio felt the need to discredit or to dispel any mere potential misgivings that the mysteriously delayed or reappeared cantos might

76

Speaking Spirits

not be from Dante’s own hand. A narrative in which the spirit of Dante himself is represented as offering the definitive version of the poem would likely be, from Boccaccio’s perspective, the strongest “evidence” for what may very well have been a tricky philological explanation for the long-missing cantos. By rising from their secret burial in the chink in a wall in Ravenna, the cantos of the Commedia received new life in public circulation. One might assume that if ever Dante’s spirit had reason to roam among the living, this act of locating and publishing the conclusion of his masterpiece would permit him at last to find rest. Much more about Dante’s passing remained unresolved, however, at least according to the famed poet’s surviving countrymen. Dante’s death in exile continued to prompt in the hearts and minds of Florentine patriots a desire to make amends. Their primary objective became to honour Dante by translating his remains from Ravenna to a tomb inside the walls of the city. It was an objective suggested by Boccaccio in another section of his Trattatello. Boccaccio on Civic Ingratitude Boccaccio’s writings also hold a crucial key to understanding the honour due to deceased poets and the ideological use of their spirits. Boccaccio’s biography of Dante acknowledges a profound interest in establishing the importance of honouring poets. Citing Solon, Boccaccio asserts that all republics stand on two feet, one of which is the punishment of crimes and the other, the rewards for virtuous deeds. Without both, the republic hobbles, if it manages to stand at all. In his Trattatello, Boccaccio upbraids Florentines for not properly remunerating Dante’s achievements, instead banishing him and leaving his bones buried in foreign soil: Oh scellerato pensiero, oh disonesta opera … In luogo di quegli, ingiusta e furiosa dannazione, perpetuo sbandimento, alienazione de’ paterni beni, e, se fare si fosse potuto, maculazione della gloriosissima fama, con false colpe gli fur donate. Delle quali cose le recenti orme della sua fuga e l’ossa nelle altrui terre sepulte … alquante ancora ne fanno chiare. (438) O iniquitous design! O shameless deed! … Instead of these rewards there was meted to him an unjust and bitter condemnation, perpetual

Divining Dante

77

banishment with alienation of his paternal goods, and, could it have been effected, the profanation of his glorious renown by false charges. The recent traces of his flight, his bones buried in an alien land … still in part bear witness to these things. (10)

By writing the Trattatello, Boccaccio, who claimed to be a “part, though a small one, of that same city” (11; “conoscendo io me essere di quella medesima città, avvegna che picciola parte, della quale,” 439), aimed to correct the injustice by offering praise to Dante, and in the Florentine language, concluding that he did so in order to keep foreigners from accusing Florentines of ingratitude: “Di queste [lettere povere] ho, e di queste darò, acciò che igualmente, e in tutto e in parte, non si possa dire, fra le nazioni strane, verso cotanto poeta la sua patria essere stata ingrata” (439; “Of these [poor words] I have, and of these will I give, that other nations may not say that his native land, both as a whole and in part, has been equally ungrateful to so great a poet,” 11).14 It particularly pained Boccaccio that Dante’s bones remained in Ravenna, and the wound of burial outside one’s homeland was reopened when Petrarch died in 1374. In a letter to Petrarch’s son-inlaw, Francescuolo da Brossano, Boccaccio wrote from Certaldo of Florentine ingratitude toward her poets, first Dante and now Petrarch. Boccaccio insists repeatedly on his Florentine citizenship in the letter: “Verum iam decimus elapsus est mensis postquam in patria publice legentem Comediam Dantis” (“it is now ten months since, while I was in my city giving public readings of Dante’s Comedy”).15 In fact, Boccaccio specifies, Florence is his native city, while Certaldo is the country of his ancestors: “avitum Certaldi” (5.1.724). The news that Petrarch wished to be buried in Arquà causes Boccaccio to lament: “Invideo Florentinus Arquati, videns illi aliena humilitate magis quam suo merito tam claram felicitatem fuisse servatam, ut sibi commissa custodia sit corporis eius, cuius egregium pectus acceptissimum Musarum et totius Helyconis habitaculum fuit” (5.1.726–8; “I, a Florentine, envy Arquà, seeing that through the baseness of others rather than any merit of its own, it has been granted the rare felicity of having committed to its custody the body of him whose noble breast was the most acceptable shelter of the Muses and of all Helicon,” 280). Now, Boccaccio continues, people from all over the world will honour Arquà, hardly known even by the inhabitants of the nearby city of Padua, as the resting place of Petrarch, just as the “hills of Posilippo”

78

Speaking Spirits

are honoured by the bones of Virgil, and Smyrna, by those of Homer. Boccaccio continues: Heu! Infelix patria, cui nati tam illustris servare cineres minime datum est, cui tam preclara negata Gloria! Equidem tanti fulgoris indigna est. Neglexisti, dum viveret, illum trahere et pro meritis in sinu collocare tuo; vocasses, si scelerum artifex, si proditionum faber, si avaritie invidie ingratitudinisque sagax fuisset offensor! Mallem tamen, qualiscunque sis, tibi hic quam Arquati contigisset honor. Sic factum est, ut vetus veritatis servaretur sententia: “Nemo susceptus est propheta in patria sua.” (5.1.728) O luckless fatherland, to whom it was not granted to preserve the ashes of such an illustrious son, to whom such rare glory was denied! To be sure, thou art unworthy of such splendor inasmuch as while he lived thou didst take no care to draw him to thee and give him a merited shelter in thy bosom. Thou wouldst have called him to thee had he been an architect of crimes, a forger of treacheries, a guileful champion of avarice, envy, or ingratitude. Yet, even so, I would that this honor had gone to thee rather than to Arquà. But it has so fallen out in order that the truth of the old saying might be confirmed: “No man is a prophet in his own country.” (280–1)

Not only does Boccaccio here compare Petrarch to a prophet, but in his lofty praises in the passage that follows he asserts that, like Christ who chose as mother a lowly virgin girl, Petrarch chooses modest Arquà over queenly Florence. In the same letter, there is also a curious passage in which Boccaccio states that tombs are more important for the lowly, unlettered social classes than for learned people: Satis tamen credibile est quoniam in conspectu eruditorum parvi momenti erit, cum sepulti virtutes, non ornamenta cadaverum prospectentur a talibus, quibus ipse se sole clariorem hactenus multis in voluminibus fecit; verum ignaris erit monimentum. Horum enim libri sculpture sunt atque picture, et insuper causa percunctandi quisnam tam grandis in eo iaceat homo. (5.1.730) Yet possibly it may be of small importance in the eyes of scholars, for the virtues of the one buried rather than the ornaments of his cadaver are held in regard by those among whom he made himself through his many

Divining Dante

79

volumes more luminous than the sun. However, it will be a memorial to the ignorant whose books are paintings and sculptures, and it will be further stimulus to inquire what kind of man lies therein. (281)

In fact, one might say that the tombs and monuments that Florentines wanted to erect in the city’s most important churches were seen as public relations acts that might galvanize the populace’s patriotic spirit as much as they were a recognition for the dead exemplar. According to Andrew Butterfield: Monuments, of course, are not intended primarily to stimulate private or personal memories; rather, they are typically directed toward the public, corporate, and social commemoration of excellence and virtue. Funerary monuments are constructed to confer fame on exemplary individuals. But all honor is social. In celebrating individuals, monuments commemorate them as members of groups, albeit as special and distinguished members.16

At least some of these civic “monuments” to Dante would not be in marble. Before proceeding to the examination of other stories featuring speaking spirits, I need to open a parenthesis concerning the very literal translation of Dante’s corpse and the public “translation,” or explication, of his poetic corpus upon the cattedra in the Florentine Cathedral. This next section presents two examples – a letter and a lecture from 1430s Florence – which serve as prototypes for subsequent authors’ use of Dante for their own political or ideological purposes. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), renowned historian and humanist scholar who would rise to the office of chancellor of Florence more than once, petitioned Ravennate authorities to return Dante’s body to its fatherland by using language very reminiscent of Boccaccio’s. Meanwhile, the Tolentine scholar of Greek and Dante, Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), was an “outsider” who turned these same words against pro-Florentine patriots in his lectures on Dante for the Florentine Studio.17 Bruni’s Petition for the Return of Dante’s Body and the Attempt on Filelfo’s Life In addition to his above-mentioned Vita di Dante of 1436, his Historiarum Florentiarum (History of the Florentine People), and some other works in which Dante figured, Bruni wrote a letter of petition dated

80

Speaking Spirits

1 February 1430 to the Lord of Ravenna, Nastasio da Polenta, requesting the return of Dante’s remains to Florence. Bruni’s letter was in response to a city ordinance, on the books at that point for more than thirty years, calling for the repatriation of the bodies of a few illustrious Florentines, including the Three Crowns.18 Si nos universusque populus noster singulari ac precipua affectione dilectioneque existit erga inclitam indeficibilemque memoriam Dantis Alagherii, poete optimi atque famosissimi, nec vos necque alium quequem decet admirari. Gloria quippe huius viri talis est ut etiam civitati nostre splendorem et laudem procul dubio afferat et illustret patriam illius ingenii lumen … Cum itaque illorum cineres atque ossa in patriam reportanda et monumentis eisdem condenda decreto patriae existant, sintque in civitate Vestra ravennati cineres atque ossa Dantis ipsius, Magnificentiam Vestram affectuosissime rogamus ut non difficilem sese velit exhibere circa illorum reductionem. Neither you nor anyone else should be astounded if we and all our people have a singular and overwhelming affection and love for the glorious and unfailing memory of Dante Alagherii, the excellent and most renowned poet. This man’s glory is such that he undoubtedly adds to the splendour and renown of our city and the light of his intellect illuminates the homeland … Since therefore there exists a decree for their ashes and remains to be brought back to the homeland and for monuments to bury them, and given that in your city of Ravenna there are the ashes and remains of Dante, we ask your excellency most affectionately not to oppose their return.19

Bruni’s petition met with no success. In his language, it is clear that he assumed or took for granted a point that others had not been and would not be so quick to concede. He trumpeted universal agreement among the Florentine people, and concerning an issue that had already been hotly contested even among very pro-Florentine writers, including Boccaccio: that Florentines had an overwhelming love for the memory of Dante, compelling enough to honour him properly in his homeland. In actuality, Florentines’ treatment of Dante after his death brought upon them many searing rebukes. The point that Dante’s glory added renown to Florence might be more doubtful than Bruni had hoped, since the bitter exile’s own language in the Commedia did not always put Florence in the most positive light. While Simon A. Gilson, whose English

Divining Dante

81

translation of Bruni’s passage I cite here, had a different focus for his study on the use of Latin and the rise of the critical appreciation of the Italian vernacular, he is absolutely correct when he notes that “Dante continued to be appropriated in order to promote a certain vision of Florence as a pre-eminent capital of culture and learning, one which encompasses both the contemporary revival of classicism and the earlier legacy of Trecento vernacular poetry” (113–14). In fact, at the same time that Bruni confidently made these claims to Ravennate officials, a highly charged situation was brewing precisely on the cattedra of Dante lectures in the cathedral of Florence: the Filelfo affair. Filelfo was born near Macerata, but over the course of his tumultuous lifetime was naturalized as a citizen of various states, including Venice and Milan. He lived in Florence during discontinuous periods of his life, most notably during the period between 1429 and 1434 when he held a cattedra to lecture on eloquence, rhetoric, and commentaries on Dante (in 1431–2). Filelfo’s personality – he was vain, impetuous, quick-tempered, and vengeful – clearly comes across to the reader of his Satyrae (Satires), and is confirmed by numerous testimonies of his contemporaries, which may help to explain why his tenure in Florence was so complicated. He came to the city with the support of Cosimo de’ Medici and Medicean intellectuals, including Bruni, and on the one hand, Filelfo’s lectures were praised and very well attended.20 On the other hand, the discontinuity of his stay was due to a falling-out with those original supporters, as Paolo Viti summarizes: “Il constrasto fra il F[ilelfo] e i suoi avversari, centrato senza dubbio su questioni culturali, riguardava, però, anche altri aspetti, di carattere squisitamente politico” (The contrast between Filelfo and his adversaries, centred without a doubt on cultural issues, concerned also other aspects, however, that were exquisitely political in nature).21 Filelfo was first removed from the cattedra in October 1431 and replaced by Medici partisan Carlo Marsuppini (1399–1453) until December of the same year. Subsequently, Filelfo became even more closely linked to the anti-Medici faction and endured ever-escalating pressures, including expulsion from the city, imprisonment for debt, and assault with a deadly weapon (only the first two acts were averted; the stab wound to his face at the hands of the Medici-supported rector of the Studio, Girolamo Broccardi, left him permanently disfigured). When the Medici were exiled in 1433, Filelfo penned scathing satires that made him even more a persona non grata when they returned just thirteen months later. He joined other exiles who were part of the anti-Medicean oligarchy, including Rinaldo degli

82

Speaking Spirits

Albizzi (1370–1442) and Palla di Onofrio Strozzi (1372–1462), in Siena. From there he hired an Athenian assassin to murder Broccardi, Marsuppini, and Cosimo de’ Medici, an unsuccessful plot that earned Filelfo the famous sentence in absentia to have his tongue cut out if he ever again set foot in Florentine territories. Late in life, Filelfo was recalled to Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici, but died of dysentery before he could be of service to him. Nonetheless, the bulk of Filelfo’s Florentine orations, including those referring to Dante in the 1430s, present a decidedly anti-Medicean stance. In lectures that Filelfo wrote and which occasionally one of his disciples would deliver, as in the following example on 29 June 1432 in Florence’s cathedral, Filelfo departed from a commentary on Dante’s poem to praise Dante’s character and speak of his defence of his city: O divino più tosto che umano! o ardentissimo della patria difensore! o liberatore della amplissima tua republica, che la vera corona per li tanti beneficii che alla tua patria desti, più che altro uomo mortale meriti! Tu solo infinite persecuzioni d’uomeni per difensione della patria incorresti; tu nelle crudeli invidie di molti scelerati per difensione de la patria intrasti; tu tra gli apuntati coltelli e tra le taglienti spade più volte ti trovasti, per difensione della patria; tu finalmente in esilio fosti mandato per difensione della patria. E più ancora dirò io degno di gran memoria, che nello esilio Dante ritrovandosi, sempre la patria lodava, sempre la magnificava, sempre la difendeva.22 Oh divine more than human! Oh most ardent defender of the homeland! Oh liberator of your most ample republic, who, more than any man, deserves the true crown for the countless benefits you brought to the homeland! You alone were subject to infinite persecutions in defence of the homeland. In defence of the homeland you became embroiled in the cruel acts of envy many evil men commit. In defence of the homeland, you often faced drawn daggers and razor-sharp swords; and finally in defence of the homeland you were sent into exile. And I will add yet something else which is worthy of being long remembered: for, Dante always praised the homeland, always applauded it, always defended it.

The political import of Filelfo’s words was made even clearer when the orator added, “‘ora è il tempo, civi pregiati, ora è il tempo che per difensione della patria non solamente le vostre ricchezze conjuniate, ma in sino alla morte, se bisogna, vi mettiate’” (“‘Now is the time, worthy

Divining Dante

83

citizens, now is the time for us, in defending the homeland, to join together not only our wealth but our very selves, until death if needs be,’” Gilson, 103). As Gilson rightly notes: The enemy, of course, is within and Filelfo’s attack is directed at the family whom the ruling oligarchy views as threatening to assume power to the detriment of the city’s freedom and its best political traditions. Dante has, in short, become a Republican rallying-cry in a manipulation of his name which is, on Filelfo’s part, an especially cynical one. An outsider, professional rhetorician, and astringent controversialist, who is clientelistically linked to the anti-Medici faction, he seizes on the opportunity to make use of Dante as a politically charged symbol at a time of tumultuous factional rivalry. (103)

While some Dante commentators and politicians were beginning to adopt the memory of Dante for their own ideological statements, until the 1430s nobody more than Filelfo politicized the deceased author of the Commedia. This politicization of Dante’s memory would necessarily colour the tone and intent of narratives featuring his ghostly spirit in the decades that followed. The 1481 Florentine Edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia The 1481 edition of Dante’s Commedia is a highly ambitious and carefully orchestrated act of civic promotion.23 The first Florentine printed edition of Dante’s masterpiece is the fruit of unparalleled collaboration among some of the most prestigious cultural figures of Medicean Florence. One is Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), professor of grammar and rhetoric at the Florentine Studio, who wrote the edition’s complex commentary, which was indebted to humanistic, allegorical, philosophical, linguistic, and astrological modes of inquiry. Another is Ficino, foremost Neoplatonic philosopher of the time, who contributed a brief preface in Latin. A third is Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), the master artist who designed the work’s woodcut illustrations, making even hell seem a place of remarkable lyric beauty.24 The work’s intent is to be, as its modern editor Roberto Cardini puts it, “la più compiuta e matura esposizione della dottrina linguistica, letteraria ed estetica dell’umanista, e volle essere soprattutto una rivendicazione gelosa e integrale di Dante a Firenze che costituisse al contempo un’accesa laudatio della città”25 (the most complete and mature exposition

84

Speaking Spirits

of the linguistic, literary, and aesthetic doctrine of the humanist, and aimed to be above all a jealous and integral revindication of Dante by Florence, that constituted at the same time a fervid laudatio of the city). In addition to introducing the Commedia and providing a biographical account of Dante, Landino penned a lengthy proem – which spans sixty-five pages in Cardini’s edition. In it, Landino presents an “Apologia nella quale si difende Dante e Florenzia da’ falsi calumniatori” (Apology in which Dante and Florence are defended from false slanderers).26 Landino brought his familiarity with classical eloquence to bear on a vernacular version of Florence’s historical and cultural apogees and a crowded catalogue of her most excellent men in religious doctrine, eloquence, music, the visual arts, law, and commerce. Even his life of Dante becomes an exaltation of Florence’s Three Crowns and the prime opportunity to promote her language: Ma tornando alla lingua, affermo che come ne’ vetusti secoli prima la lingua greca, dipoi la latina per gran copia di scrittori, e’ quali di tempo in tempo la ripulirono, di roza e povera divenne elimata, così la nostra e già da ora per la virtù degli scrittori da me nominati è divenuta abondante ed elegante, e ogni giorno, se non mancheranno gli studi, più diventerà. But going back to the language, I affirm that as in ancient ages – first the Greek language, then Latin through its great many writers who improved it from time to time, such that from coarse and poor it was honed – so our own [language] by virtue of the writers I mentioned, has already become rich and elegant and will become ever more so every day if studies are not lacking.27

One could almost say that Florentines were overdue in honouring their compatriot, because “foreigners” – mostly non-Florentine Italians – were by their actions beginning to embarrass the Florentines for their lack of attention to Dante. Some Florentines had been trying since Dante’s death to reclaim him from Ravenna and thus properly honour their most illustrious citizen, but negotiations become even more insistent during the half century between the 1470s and 1520s. In 1476, prominent Florentine citizen and Dante scholar Antonio Manetti wrote a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici reminding him of the promise he made after Matteo Palmieri’s funeral in 1475 to demand from Bernardo Bembo, then Venetian ambassador to Florence, that Dante’s remains be repatriated.28 In the proem to his 1481 Florentine edition of Dante’s

Divining Dante

85

Commedia, Landino expressly states, addressing himself to his fellow Florentine citizens, “pe’ prieghi del popolo fiorentino, el quale sommamente lo desidera, e per vostra patria < farete > sia iure postliminii da essilio revocato e renduto alla sua città e collocato in quel tempio el quale è sommo e catedrale e constituitogli propria e onorata sedia, acciò che tandem si posi dove innanzi al suo essilio lungo tempo s’affannò per la quiete della vostra libertà”29 (through the prayers of the Florentine people who desire it most highly, and on behalf of your country you bring him back from exile iure postliminii and render him to his city, placing him in that temple that is the greatest cathedral constituting for him the proper and honourable place, so that tandem he can rest where before his exile he had long worked so that you might know peace and liberty). When these Florentines would not manage to translate Dante’s remains, they would instead find a means of recalling him, if only in spirit. Meanwhile, some Dante admirers outside of Florence, including Venetian Bernardo Bembo, were wasting no time in demonstrating through deeds their desire to honour Dante’s memory. Bembo, who would subsequently serve as Podestà and military captain on the Ravenna campaign, completed in 1483 an impressive restoration of Dante’s tomb, which had lain in squalor for some time.30 Landino wrote a letter to Bembo later that same year remarking on the success of the first printing of Florence’s edition of Dante’s Commedia and, one could say, making certain that the Venetian was aware that Florentines were now mobilizing to reclaim Dante, or at least his spirit, which among the Neoplatonic Florentine milieu might be said to be the higher part of him.31 Landino’s edition with its commentary was also the partisan civic response to the popular 1477 Venetian and 1478 Milanese editions of the Commedia.32 The presentation copy of the 1481 edition included a dedication to the Signoria of Florence. By implication, this project’s grand mobilization of the Medici cultural circle also sought to bolster Lorenzo de’ Medici’s political standing in the aftermath of two important events: the 1478 Pazzi conspiracy and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s dramatic ambassadorial mission to the King of Naples in 1479–80. The first event resulted in the death of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano and Lorenzo’s own narrow escape from death with a stab wound. Lorenzo’s trip to Naples saved Florence from invasion, but hardly consolidated his power during a time of great fiscal and domestic social upheaval.33 Lorenzo likely looked to his grandfather Cosimo’s successful public self-imaging in light of the

86

Speaking Spirits

founding of Florence’s Platonic Academy and library, which helped to earn him the honorary appellation Pater Patriae, for a cultural blueprint to solidify his own prestige. However, it was Ficino’s contribution to the 1481 edition of the Commedia that truly exemplified the city’s attempt to repossess Dante in spirit: “Florentia iam diu maesta, sed tandem laeta, Danthi suo Aligherio, post duo ferme saecula iam redivivo et in patriam restituto ac denique coronato, congratulatur” (153; “Florence, long sad but joyful at last, warmly congratulates its poet Dante, who has come back to life and to his homeland for a glorious crowning after an absence of two centuries”).34 In his preface, Ficino praises Landino as the vessel containing the reborn spirit of Dante. Ficino speaks in the guise of Florence herself, who has sadly mourned Dante’s long exile. Dante’s prophecy in Paradiso 25.1–9 that he would one day receive the laurel crown in the Baptistery has been fulfilled now, he states. Dante’s father Apollo, moved to pity by the poet’s long exile and Florence’s weeping, sends Mercury to the “piae Christophori Landini divini vatis menti” (153; “devout mind of the divine poet Cristoforo Landino,” 180). Mercury metamorphoses into the image of Landino and through a “miraculous virga” gives Dante life and the wings to return to his city to receive Apollo’s crown. Florence exclaims, “O quam pulcriorem quamve beatiorem nunc te, dulcis nate, recipio, quam amiserim!” (153; “O dear son, how much more distinguished and blessed you are now than when I lost you!” 180). Dante once left Florence in his human aspect, but he returns in a truly divine one. At his coronation, Dante is taken up to heaven, a “nullis amplius visae, hodie nobis manifeste corruscant” (154; “The flames of the empyrean have never been more visible than they are today, shining brightly for us,” 180), to the tune of the harmony of the nine spheres and the angelic hierarchy. Not incidentally, Ficino emphasizes Dante’s Florentine citizenship or Florence’s repossession of the poet at least six times, culminating in a personified Florence welcoming Dante home and inviting her citizens to rejoice with all of heaven in Dante’s return from exile.35 Such assertions suggest an almost hyperbolic apophasis: Ficino openly denies the truth by repeatedly exaggerating the contrary. Florence truly has not managed to recall Dante physically to his homeland, so now can only do so rhetorically and symbolically. Moreover, historical attempts to translate Dante’s body, prompting and being prompted by literary, symbolic representations of that act, indicate that the intellectual value

Divining Dante

87

of Dante remains linked to the public value of his body for the body politic. Girolamo Benivieni’s 1506 Edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia When the next Florentine edition of the entire Commedia was published in 1506, the political and cultural climate of the city was radically different.36 Editor Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542) lived through those transitions from Medicean Florence to a Savonarolan-inspired government, then to a phase of arrabbiati reprisals following the execution of Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. These events had a profound impact on Benivieni and his poem published with the 1506 edition of the Commedia, the “Cantico in laude di Dante.” Like its 1481 predecessor with its tour de force of patriotic and allegorical interpretation by Landino, the 1506 edition promotes an agenda of civic pride. Nevertheless, the 1506 version’s frame implicitly exalts not a Medicean and mythologized Florence, as Landino’s edition did, but one favourably influenced after the 1490s by Savonarola’s zealous call to spiritual repentance. What is particularly striking about the 1506 version is how the work’s editor articulated this new civic vision in the edition’s proem: as a prophecy received directly from the spirit of Dante. This proem, a 199-line poem in terza rima in evident imitation of a Dantean canto, is the next focus of analysis, offering opportunities to consider the literary, ethical, and political dimensions of Benivieni’s use of eidolopoeia.37 Benivieni’s development as an author parallels closely that of Botticelli in art: both men flourished in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s intellectual circle, subsequently repudiating aspects of this period of their lives when they embraced the moral reforms of the Dominican friar. Benivieni came to cultural prominence as a teenager, delighting the Medicean cultural milieu with his astonishing ability to recite poems, composed spontaneously. He also played the viol, earning for himself the nickname of the “Other Orpheus.”38 A life-threatening illness in 1470 prohibited him from continuing a regular course of study. Nonetheless, he developed in the company of leading humanists and members of the Florentine Platonic Academy, including Ficino, Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), and Pandolfo Collenuccio (1444–1504). Benivieni surpassed many of his peers, especially in the study of Hebrew.39 He wrote a collection of Petrarchan-style love lyrics and well-received pastoral poems, and he cast a Boccaccian novella in verse.

88

Speaking Spirits

At Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in 1492, Florence was left without a leader embodying his cultural, political, and ambassadorial acumen. When King Charles VIII descended on the Italian peninsula with a formidable army to assert his rights to the Kingdom of Naples, Piero de’ Medici (1472–1503) ignominously offered him Florentine castles and territories. Piero was then driven into exile by a majority of Florentines who came to rally behind Savonarola, a Ferrarese preacher who managed to mitigate the devastating effects of quartering French forces in the city of Florence by urging the king to continue his quest. The friar backed his arguments with prophecies he claimed came directly from God threatening grim consequences should the king not hasten to continue his march to the south. Under Savonarola’s influence, Florentines created a new government, whose centrepiece was the Great Council, as well as transformative social programs – most notably the Monte della Pietà – while the fiery friar fulminated from the pulpits of San Marco and the cathedral, demanding ever more morally rigid changes in personal behaviour. The culmination of these moral reforms took the form of public bonfires, known as the Burning of the Vanities, on which citizens were encouraged to cast vices (such as gambling dice or playing cards), luxury items (such as cosmetics, jewels, and fine clothing), and distractions from Christian thoughts (such as classical literature or art work inspired by pagan myths, or images of nude figures). Benivieni experienced a profound spiritual conversion, joining Savonarola’s followers, known as piagnoni, and shifted his literary interests to more spiritual subjects. He translated a number of Savonarola’s works and composed some of the lauds that the Florentine populace sang in religious processions. During the period in the 1490s when piagnone partisans dominated Florentine government, authorities tried to recall Dante’s descendants from Verona in a gesture of spiritual repentance, political reconciliation, and homage toward the poet.40 Their attempts, however, were unsuccessful. Support for the friar within Florence soon waned, as antagonistic pressures from Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1431–1503) increased and piagnone hopes of an allied French return to Italy faded. The pope issued an interdict against the city of Florence in 1498 and ordered Florentines doing business in Rome arrested and their goods confiscated, measures that precipitated violent division within Florence. On 23 May 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned at the stake with two of his associates in Piazza della Signoria. The friar had disobeyed the Roman curia’s calls to go to Rome to submit and answer to questions

Divining Dante

89

concerning his prophecies and other writings; he also celebrated Mass while under the decree of excommunication. Reprisals against Savonarolan sympathizers by the next government, sustained principally by the compagnacci or arrabbiati faction, were swift and severe. Simone de’ Filipepi (1443–1512) was among the piagnoni who noted the debilitating repercussions for like-minded citizens in his Cronaca (Chronicle): In quello che fra Girolamo fu preso, molti huomini da bene hebbero a fuggire da Fiorenza, ritirandosi a qualche villa del contado, et ancora Bologna et Siena et altrove, per non esser perseguitati da chi all’hora reggeva, che quasi tutti erano nimici della dottrina di detto Padre. Et io Simone di Mariano de’ Philipepi men’andai all’hora a Bologna, dove trovai molti altri de’ nostri che quivi s’erono rifuggiti. Degli altri che erono rimasi se ne pigliava ogni di, et erono tormentati et ammoniti.41 In that [time] when fra Girolamo was taken, many good men had to flee Florence, seeking shelter in some country houses or in Bologna or Siena or elsewhere, so as not to be persecuted by those in power, who were almost all enemies of the said father’s doctrine. I, Simone di Mariano de’ Filipepi, went then to Bologna, where I found many others of our party who had fled there. Of the others who remained [in Florence], some were seized each day and were tortured and excluded [from holding public office].

But strong feelings and vindictive actions came from the other side, as well, especially if one considers the treatment of Savonarola’s executioner, Doffo Spini, who in 1503 was stoned to death and his corpse desecrated by being kicked through the streets and dumped into the Arno River. It was in this dangerously high-strung environment that Benivieni edited Dante’s masterpiece and composed his “Cantico.” At the time, he could confidently claim the distinction of “maggior poeta in volgare, che a Firenze fosse rimasto” (the greatest poet in the vernacular who remained to Florence).42 Unlike Landino, however, who established a firm reputation as a Dante scholar by lecturing on Dante before he took up editing the 1481 edition of the Commedia, Benivieni possessed few obvious qualifications as an editor of Dante’s masterpiece. Benivieni’s reputation as a scholar of Dante probably rested primarily on the genre and structure (perhaps more than the content) of his Commento di Hieronymo Benivieni a più sue canzone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza

90

Speaking Spirits

Divina (Commentary on Some of His Own Songs and Sonnets on Love and Divine Beauty, 1500).43 In the “Cantico” Benivieni chooses language and subject matter that clearly call to the reader’s mind specific and vivid situations from the Commedia. Benivieni opens his “Cantico” by emulating Dante’s tendency in the Commedia to record the temporal setting of his narrative by means of a mythological periphrasis. By speaking of Aurora presenting herself on the balcony of the East, Benivieni recalls the incipit of Purgatorio 9, which furnishes a model for Benivieni’s setting of the dream narrative at sunrise, since, according to a tradition that Dante perpetuates, early morning dreams have prophetic qualities.44 By commencing in this way, Benivieni likely wishes to bolster belief in the truth quality of the prophecy that Dante’s spirit will subsequently speak. The “Cantico” dream’s physical setting closely resembles that of Dante’s Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory.45 Benivieni states that the locus amoenus of his dream seemed to him that which Eve had lost (“quel che perdett’ Eva,” line 18). Instead of the lone Matelda figure, however, to Benivieni appears a choir of nine ladies. Benivieni goes on to identify Dante’s spirit in the “Cantico” with Virgil’s in the Commedia when these muses announce the presence of Dante’s apparition with the exclamation, “Honorate l’altissimo Poeta” (line 57). These are precisely the same words the spirit of Homer uses to greet Virgil in Dante’s Limbo: “Onorate l’altissimo poeta:/l’ombra sua torna, ch’era dipartita” (Inf. 4.80–1; “Honor the highest poet: his shade returns, that had departed”).46 If in the Commedia Dante claimed for himself the status of being “sesto tra cotanto senno,” the sixth among the great poets Homer, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil (Inf. 4.102), Benivieni not so subtly also claims special poetic distinction for himself by receiving the laurel crown in the dream narrative. The physical setting of the “Cantico” in the Earthly Paradise also emphasizes the issue of poetic genealogy. For Benivieni, “Dante” appears in the “Cantico” in the same place where “Virgil” in the Commedia left Dante-pilgrim. Dante’s spirit affirms in the “Cantico”: “Qui ’l mio Duca lasciommi e qui si tacque” (line 100; Here [in the Earthly Paradise] my Guide left me and here he fell silent). The consequences in terms of the civic discourse are also apparent: Dante’s poem on the literary “founding” of God’s Eternal City succeeds Virgil’s account of Rome’s founding. In his turn, Benivieni presents Florence as the New Jerusalem, the new Earthly Paradise.

Divining Dante

91

After the muses’ epideictic exclamation in the “Cantico,” Benivieni identifies Dante as the poet honoured above all others, the one who not only took the glory of the Italian language from Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti, but also chased all other contenders from the nest.47 In this way Benivieni adopts the speech that “Oderisi da Gubbio” made to Dante-pilgrim in the Commedia (Purg. 11.97–9), but drops entirely the doubt that perhaps another poet is born who will outshine the two Guidos.48 It is also not inconceivable that in Benivieni’s re-evocation of a string of poets who brought glory to the Florentine tongue, he obliquely discounts foreign prestige in literary questions. This implied critique of Pietro Bembo’s authority becomes more apparent in the second part of the “Cantico,” in which Benivieni relates the dialogue he has with Dante’s spirit. Whereas Dante was once the living poet making his trip through the other world, now it is Benivieni, as living poet, who records his encounter with Dante’s spirit. “Dante” speaks first, and his words are quite familiar: “Amore,/acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese,/pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore” (lines 76–8; Love, sparked by virtue, always ignites another, if its flame appears outwardly). They are the same words that Dante-author placed in the mouth of his character Virgil, addressing them to “Statius” in Purgatorio 22.10–12. By referring to this particular incident in the Commedia, Benivieni brings to mind an instance in which poetry became a vehicle for prophecy, since the spirit of Statius credited Virgil’s words with prompting his Christian conversion. In the Commedia, “Virgil” explained how when word of Statius’s work – indebted as it was to Virgil’s own – came to him in Limbo, he was sparked with great affection for the Silver Age poet. “Dante” responds similarly to Benivieni in the “Cantico.” It is Love that impels Dante’s spirit to descend from paradise to speak to the Renaissance poet. In lines 106–8, “Dante” summarizes the purpose of his otherworldly journey and the composition of the Commedia, stating that he wrote the poem “Acciò che scorta l’una e l’altra via/ Del ciel e dell’abysso e’ vostri petti/Tirar potessi al ben ch’ogn’ huom disia” (So that having seen both ways to heaven and to the abyss, your hearts might be turned to the Good that everyone desires). Benivieni shifts the Landinian reading of Dante’s Commedia as the Platonic education of the soul to an individual moral imperative. Dante was a true poet-philosopher, whose verses contain heavenly concepts infused by Love: “Quinci e’ celesti miei nuovi concetti/Amor in tanti e tanti versi effuse/Quanti sai tu che gl’ hai più volti letti” (lines 109–11; In

92

Speaking Spirits

this way Love poured out my new heavenly concepts in lots and lots of verses, as you know who have read them many times).49 In these same lines Dante’s spirit recognizes that Benivieni knows his Commedia extremely well.50 It is at this point in the “Cantico” that the spirit of Dante reveals the motivation for its appearance. The spirit requests that Benivieni edit the Commedia. Benivieni responds with another direct citation from a still different context in the Commedia: the encounter between “Virgil” and “Sordello” in Purgatorio 7.16–17. Benivieni’s words, “‘O gloria,’ dissi, ‘de’ Poeti, in cui/Monstrò quanto potea la lingua nostra’” (124–5; “O glory,” I said, “of the Poets in whom was shown how much our language is capable”), echo precisely: “O gloria d’i Latin,” disse, “per cui mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra, o pregio etterno del loco ond’ io fui, qual merito o qual grazia mi ti mostra? S’io son d’udir le tue parole degno, dimmi se vien d’inferno, e di qual chiostra” “Oh glory of the Italians,” he said, “through whom our tongue showed its power, O eternal honor of the place I was from, what merit or what grace shows you to me? If I am worthy to hear your words, tell me if you come from Hell, and from what cloister.”

Benivieni effectively transfers the esteem for the Latin language in the Sordello-Virgil encounter to praise Florentine poets, including himself, in this example and the next, in which Benivieni indicates Dante’s status as the first of a poetic school (“‘l prim’ honour di questa scola,” “Cantico,” line 130). The allusion this time is to the dialogue between Dante-pilgrim and “Bonagiunta da Lucca” in Purgatorio 24, where Dante succeeded in asserting the superiority of his own poetic project based on its direct adherence to Love’s dictates. Dante’s spirit in the “Cantico” explains to Benivieni that the favour granted to him to see Dante’s glory comes from that Love alone. Love reveals the divine hand that Benivieni claims as the guiding force behind his encounter with Dante’s spirit. But “Dante” is eager for Benivieni to answer a doubt of his concerning the use of past tense to indicate

Divining Dante

93

provenance. The spirit of Dante wonders if Benivieni is denying his native Florence because of political difficulties: “Ma dimmi perché dinanzi ’io fui’ dicesti/Et non più presto ‘del loc’ ond’io sono’?/Sarien già a te come già fur molesti/A me gli fratri tuoi sì che tu voglia/Per lor sottrarti al loc’ ove nascesti?” (lines 134–8; But tell me why before did you say, “I was” and not instead from “the place of which I am”? Could it be that your brothers are as injurious to you as they were to me such that you wish to abandon your birthplace on their account?). The question cannot help but bring to mind “Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti”’s inquiry in Inferno 10. Similar to the question posed by the spirit of Guido Cavalcanti’s father to Dante-pilgrim in the Commedia, this one focuses on a misunderstanding sparked by the use of a verb in the remote past tense. In the Commedia, “Cavalcanti” mistakenly believed his son to be dead from Dante’s reference to Guido with the term “ebbe.” In the “Cantico,” the character Dante errs in thinking that Benivieni wishes to deny Florence, the place of his birth, when Benivieni says, “io fui” and not “del loc’ ond’io sono” (my emphasis). Benivieni explains that he uses the past absolute tense because he assumes he is dead, but realizes now that this is not the case: Et io, “Perché da quest’ invida spoglia Del mortal corp’ esser disciolto alhora Mi parve ch’io fu’ ratto a questa soglia. Però disse ‘ond’io fui,’ ma ben veggi’ hora … che pur di lei mi vesto anchora”. And I, “Because it seemed to me that from this lowly hide of the mortal body I was dissolved and had been snatched to this shore, so did I say, ‘whence I was,’ but now I see clearly … that I still wear this flesh”.51

However, the fact remains that Benivieni alludes in his poem to possible persecution by fellow Florentines, an issue that would give him an incentive for penning a proem that also has a motivation of selfdefence. The literary comparison with a context in the Commedia that deals specifically with heresy may not be accidental either. Heresy was a charge commonly associated with Savonarola. By suggesting that

94

Speaking Spirits

Savonarola’s ideas live on in him and in Florence and emphasizing the divine sanction of his poetic mission, Benivieni may be implicitly but pointedly contrasting Savonarola’s living vision with the eternal death of “Cavalcanti”’s heresy. Nevertheless, there is hardly a glimpse of this suggestion of Benivieni’s political persecution. In line 145 of the “Cantico” Benivieni contrasts his close relationship to Florence as “motherland” with her cruel treatment of Dante as “stepmother” (“La patria ch’a me madre, a te noverca,” “Cantico,” line 145). Benivieni’s words echo two separate passages of Dante’s Paradiso (16.58–61 and 17.46–51), both of which were lines spoken by “Cacciaguida” and both of which contextualized or prophesied Dante’s exile.52 Despite the fact that Benivieni points out the divergences in Florence’s treatment of her two poets, the comparison paradoxically seems to link Benivieni’s situation more closely, not less closely, to his illustrious predecessor’s. Benivieni notes that the way Florentines remember Dante now at the turn of the sixteenth century is much different from the way they treated him at the turn of the fourteenth century. In language that once again recasts entire tercets from Dante’s poem, Benivieni asserts that Dante’s once unfulfilled dream of being recognized by and welcomed back to his native city is now a reality. At one time Florence, the metaphorical lion, behaved in a fierce, cruel, and bitter (“fero … crudo e acro,” lines 148–9) way toward Dante, but now she has become humble as a lamb (“hor come agnel s’è fatto humile,” line 150). Like an Orpheus figure, Dante succeeded in taming the civic beast by his divine song, winning over Florence’s cruelty. Benivieni says to Dante’s spirit in the “Cantico” (lines 151–6): Che ’l dolce suon del tuo poema sacro Al qual ha’ posto man e ciel e terra Et che molt’anni già ti fece macro, Vinta ha la crudeltà che alhor ti serra Fuor dell’ovile, ove dormivi agnello Nimico a’ lupi che gli facien guerra. The sweet sound of your sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have plied their hands and that for many years made you lean, Has overcome the cruelty that once locked you outside the sheepfold where you slept as a lamb, enemy to the wolves that waged war on it.

Divining Dante

95

By wording his speech to the spirit of Dante in this way, Benivieni hardly changes the vision in Paradiso 25.1–9 that Dante-poet had wished for himself: Se mai continga che ’l poema sacro, al quale ha posto mano e Cielo e terra, sì che m’ha fatto per più anni macro, vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra del bello ovile ov’io dormi’ agnello, nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra, con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornerò poeta, e in sul fronte del mio battesmo prenderò ’l cappello If it ever happen that the sacred poem, to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand, so that for many years it has made me lean, vanquish the cruelty that locks me out of the lovely sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy of the wolves that make war on it, with other voice by then, with other fleece I shall return a poet, and at the font of my baptism I shall accept the wreath

Benivieni emphasizes the public monumentalization of Dante within the city of Florence when he states that “le porte li muri e’ pavimenti/ De l’immagine tua s’han fatto fregio” (lines 161–2; the gates, the walls, and the walkways/are decorated with your image). But tombs, like other kinds of monuments, are not for the dead, as much as they are for the living. Benivieni may hail “Dante” – now a ghostly spirit – as a prophet of the city’s imminent conversion, but Dante nevertheless continues to be associated with the past: indeed Dante is literally petrified throughout the city of Florence. Benivieni’s text is an exemplification of a relationship of mutual dependence between the living and the dead: the dead need to have their worth and fame diffused among younger generations of the living to maintain their memory and authoritative status, in this case, that of “altissimo poeta.” But the living also need the dead. The greatness of Florence in Benivieni’s time depended to a large extent on its culturally gifted predecessors. By imitating Dante, Benivieni also contributes to

96

Speaking Spirits

his own poetic prestige. Moreover, the rhetorical strategy that Benivieni uses is important: he effectively authorizes himself as the true editor of the Commedia because he penned this poem in which “Dante” directly confers on him that status. Nevertheless, the mutual dependence between the living and the dead is fraught with tensions. At the same time that Benivieni conjures the voice of Dante’s spirit, he underscores the fact that his speaker is dead – merely a ghost. It is clear that Benivieni shows much pride in the moral reforms and artistic contributions of his city and the way she honours the poet who brings her such great glory.53 These words are said to cause “Dante”’s eyes to flame like glowing coals, a direct quotation from the Paradiso, once again from the episode between Dante-pilgrim and “Cacciaguida.”54 Dante’s spirit then utters his difficult prophecy: Florence’s political situation is about to change, and she will be freed from the evil ties that presently bind her. The Lion – the Marzocco representing Florence – will be well punished for its sins and her citizens will suffer, but their pains, according to Dante’s spirit, are intended as a corrective measure, so that Florence might eventually achieve greater glory. Benivieni deliberately chooses coded language to articulate the prophecy, however. Lines 178–80 of the “Cantico” are highly Dantean, repeating word for word “Beatrice”’s exegesis of the symbolic spectacle in the Comedy’s Earthly Paradise: “Sappi che ’l vaso che ’l serpente ruppe,/fu e non è; ma chi n’ha colpa, creda/che vendetta di Dio non teme suppe” (Purg. 33.34–6; “Know that the vessel the serpent broke was and/is no more; but let him who is to blame believe/that God’s vengeance fears no sop”). The context of the Commedia is potentially quite important, since “Beatrice” introduced these words with the injunction that Dante-pilgrim cast off fear and shame and speak no more “like one who dreams” (“che non parli più com’ om che sogna,” Purg. 33.33). Benivieni, who deliberately casts his entire “Cantico” in the form of a dream narrative, would seem to be signalling here that what follows in the “Cantico,” like what follows in “Beatrice”’s explanation, is meant to be understood as having greater weight of truth and authority than mere dreaming. But particularly ambiguous, and significantly so, are the spirit’s final words to Benivieni in the “Cantico.” “Dante” states: “e chi l’ascolta non l’intenda” (line 192; and may he who hears not understand). A statement of this kind can lend an aura of mystery to the enunciation. It can refer, on the one hand, to a context of Renaissance hermeticism – only

Divining Dante

97

the adepts of a Neoplatonic ascension of wisdom can perceive the hidden significances of the prophecy. On the other hand, the statement resonates strongly with Savonarolan prophecies and biblical overtones. In particular, the language is reminiscent of Jesus speaking in parables. In his words of envoi, Dante’s spirit says that his soul must return to its nest, whence with Love he came to speak. The dream ends. In sum, the most temporally proximate Florentine edition of Dante’s complete work is a crucial point of reference for Benivieni’s edition. Landino dedicates a large part of his proem to trumpeting Florence’s best qualities and extolling her most notable citizens. His treatment of the divine furor of the true poeta-vates is a veritable manifesto of Platonic Academy poetics, promoting not so incidentally its “magnificent” patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici. In uncovering the supposed hidden significances of Dante’s poetry, Landino’s interpretation actually makes Dante a hero for the ideals of Medicean Florence.55 In fact, one of Landino’s primary concerns, as evidenced by his dedicatory oration, is in asserting the superiority of Florentine culture and language, “Questo solo affermo, avere liberato el vostro cittadino dalla barbarie di molti esterni idiomi ne’ quali da’ comentatori era stato corrotto” (This alone I affirm: my task has been to liberate your citizen [Dante] from the barbarisms of many foreign phrases, by which his work had been corrupted by commentators).56 Landino marshals proof for his assertion of Florence’s linguistic pre-eminence by pointing out that all Italian writers worthy to be called such have forced themselves to use Tuscan. He spurns subtlety in conjoining linguistic and patriotic or political interests: “Né solamente giudicai essere officio di buono cittadino investigare con diligenzia nella prefazione del libro le laude di tanto poeta, ma con quelle ancora congiugnere le onorifiche virtù della nostra republica” (Nor did I judge it my sole task in the preface of this book to investigate with diligence the praises of such a poet, as any good citizen would. I also join with those praises the honourable virtues of our Republic).57 In the way he edits the Commedia and promotes the Florentine vernacular, Landino is responding directly to editorial decisions made by non-Florentine editors of the Commedia in the 1470s, especially by Martino Paolo Nidobeato in the 1478 Milanese edition. Twenty-five years after Landino’s effort, Benivieni faces the same task. In the “Cantico,” Dante’s spirit asks Benivieni to restore his lyre, that is, to re-edit the Commedia after foreign editors with ears deaf to the Florentine language have attempted to revise the poem and judge it on linguistic grounds. In other words, Benivieni must restore Dante’s

98

Speaking Spirits

Commedia after its mistreatment by foreign editors. Although there is no mention of Pietro Bembo by name, his 1502 Venetian edition would seem to be the clear target, and it would prove to be a formidable adversary. The similar page layout and almost identical italic typefaces accentuate the way in which the 1506 edition emulates the 1502 one.58 Bembo, with his revolutionary return to Boccaccio’s manuscript (Vat. Lat. 3199, which Bembo’s father held in his personal library), helps to establish a new way of reading the Commedia as a classic text and as an artefact worthy of philological scrutiny. But Benivieni is ultimately more concerned with arguing the primacy of the Commedia’s ethical value over its purely linguistic one. The civic concerns at stake in Landino’s poetic project return in Benivieni’s “Cantico,” but in the service of a much different Florence.59 In the “Cantico,” Benivieni creates a spirit of Dante that serves to critique other editors’ mistreatment of the Commedia, as well as to proclaim an uncharacteristic, Savonarolan-style prophecy. The result is an authoritative judgment and command seemingly from beyond the grave, but articulated by a living partisan in a way most likely to deflect political dangers during a particularly vulnerable period of time. The “Cantico” thus does much more than merely introduce the text of the Commedia or praise Dante, as its title suggests. It embodies with great subtlety and in ways that are distinct from the 1481 Medicean appropriation of Dante’s spirit larger questions concerning the political implications of poetic interpretation at the time.60 In particular, the 1506 Commedia’s editor negotiates in his “Cantico” a poetic-critical position in the face of pro-Medicean cultural ties and the fiercely Republican moral reforms of Savonarola’s legacy. By putting his vision of future Florentine civic development in the mouth of Dante’s spirit, Benivieni appropriates Dante’s authority to promote what was in the first years of the sixteenth century an implicitly risky ideological position. This “praise of Dante” also serves not incidentally to praise Benivieni: Dante’s spirit explicitly rejoices in Benivieni’s reception of the poet’s laurel crown. The allusions that Benivieni in his “Cantico” makes to situations in the Commedia refer back to passages in all three canticles and in effect recast the interlocutors, Dante and Benivieni, in various Commedia guises and revisions. The spirit of Dante in the “Cantico,” for instance, speaks sometimes in “Virgil”’s words, other times in “Beatrice”’s words, still others in “Cacciaguida”’s. But a thread that ties all of the cited episodes together is a particular concern with authority and prophecy. Dante’s

Divining Dante

99

poem and person become the auctoritates through which Benivieni can dare to present his Savonarolan vision for Florence’s future. While he was alive, the author of the Commedia and De Monarchia represented the position that a Virgilian empire, tempered by the spiritual sun in the form of papal power, together held the potential for the political formation of an Earthly Paradise. However, Benivieni, influenced by Savonarolan denunciations of the Curia, appropriated the idol of Dante as the mouthpiece that would herald the truth of Florence’s new foundation as the Earthly Paradise that papal Rome, in its present corruption, could no longer promise.61 It is true that with the 1506 Florentine edition of the Commedia Benivieni does not respond to Bembo’s grand linguistic challenges. For Benivieni there is much more at stake: what he sees as the moral and civic essence of poetry. For the Florentine heirs of Brunian humanism, poetry breaks the confines of any linguistic, self-enclosed boundaries imposed on it to engage a wider network of moral, philosophical, and political concerns and debates. Moreover, Benivieni wrote in a time when he believed Florentines had repented of their ill treatment of Dante during the final years of his life in exile and wanted to honour him in death by translating his remains back to Florence. Benivieni, whose own situation in the politically divided city risked becoming a sad repetition of Dante’s economic ruin and exile, or worse (Benivieni’s ideological associate Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498), aimed to link himself in every possible way in the minds of his fellow citizens with Dante. In a striking reversal, it is Dante’s spirit in the “Cantico in laude di Dante” that appears to praise Benivieni and the Florence of Benivieni’s time. Dante’s spirit explicitly rejoices in Benivieni’s future reception of the poet’s crown. Thus, by placing his message in the culturally authoritative mouth of Dante’s spirit, Benivieni managed to support indirectly the piagnone program. Piagnoni like Benivieni could thus take refuge behind a safe cultural icon, while making Dante the mouthpiece for Savonarolan fulminations and prophecies that, besides being anachronistic, were decidedly uncharacteristic for the author of the Commedia. Florentine Attempts to Repatriate Dante’s Bones Soon after the publication of Benivieni’s 1506 edition of Dante’s Commedia, however, various events appeared to signal a change in Florence’s fortunes and specifically the prospects of translating Dante’s remains from Ravenna to Florence. During the war of the League of Cambrai,

100

Speaking Spirits

Ravenna passed to pontifical territory in 1509. With the assistance of Ferdinand II of Aragon, the Medici returned from exile to Florence in 1512, and in 1513 Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni, ascended to the papacy, taking the name of Pope Leo X. Perhaps the palleschi (or Medicean faction) in Florence would have better fortunes than the piagnoni. Representatives of the recently revived Sacra Accademia, with permission from the pope, seized the opportunity in 1515 to write an appeal to the papal secretary Pietro Bembo, Bernardo’s son. Florentines, the letter stated, no longer wished to honour Dante’s memory merely with “efficaci parole” (bold words), but also with “gloriosi facti, et opere degne” (glorious actions and worthy works), and they insisted that the cardinal do all he could to ensure the return of Dante’s remains to his homeland.62 It was an order that Bembo could not deny, but he evidently managed to postpone taking action on the matter. Members of the Accademia followed up twelve days later with a letter addressed directly to Pope Leo X outlining their intentions. The following year, in October 1516, after no progress had been made in the case, Florentines could no longer contain their impatience. The Accademia sent another missive to the pope. This one was written in an urgent, almost alarmist tone and it reported that the Academy’s president, Antonio d’Orsino Benintendi, claimed to hear the disembodied voice of Dante: in diverse hore e tempi, sempre presso a l’Aurora havere sentito uscire della Sacra Academia, dove lui dimora, una gran voce dicendo: “Adesso, adesso, adesso è il tempo, che io uscirò della odiosa tomba di Ravenna, perchè la pieta supera la malignità, come già predissi.” at different hours and moments, but always around dawn, [Benintendi] had heard a great voice coming from the Sacred Academy where he lived saying: “Now, now, now is the time for me to leave the odious tomb in Ravenna, since piety now vanquishes evil, as I foretold.”

As if the narrative featuring Dante’s spirit were not already clear in its intent, the letter writers followed it with their own gloss addressed directly to the pope: O padre sanctissimo, il divino poeta invoca il nome della Beatitudine Vostra, della quale, et non d’altri, ha già tanto tempo profetato quella gloria, nella quale si trova, rivo et esuberante fonte di pietà, di gratia et

Divining Dante

101

misericordia, da una tanto celeste virtù invocato, et al suo proprio instinto tirato, che ogni malignità amorza con la sua pietà, come in decti versi per lui si canta. O beatissimo signore, oda la Sanctità Vostra et inclini la sua volontà alli devotissimi preghi del divino poeta, manda alla Beatitudine Vostra, per godere in morte quel fructo che lui predisse, et che la Sanctità Vostra in vita al presente gloriosamente si gode delle sue lunghe fatiche et vigilie. (4.475) O most holy father, the divine poet invokes the name of Your Holiness from whom, and not from others, he had already long ago prophesied that glory in which one finds the shore and exuberant font of piety, grace, and mercy called upon by such a heavenly virtue and drawn by his instinct that every malignity crush with its pity, as he sings in his verses. O most blessed lord, may Your Holiness hear and incline your will to the very devoted prayers of the divine poet, sent to Your Blessedness in order to enjoy in death the fruits that he foretold and that Your Holiness in life can now rejoice in through his long toils and vigils.

Here again Florentines seem to be adopting a fictive voice of the spirit of Dante in order to lend to their cause a more urgent, impassioned, and authoritative air. The words rhetorically placed in the mouth of Dante’s spirit express all the anti-Ravennate partisan scorn that Florentine Accademia members held in the same breath that they re-evoke lines from Dante’s poem (Par. 25.1–9). When this letter still did not provoke the desired effect, the Florentines sent Pope Leo X another more formal reminder to repatriate Dante’s bones.63 Among the signatures of the letter dated 20 October 1519 were those of Benivieni and Michelangelo Buonarroti, who famously promised to sculpt a monument worthy of the divine poet in Florence. Pier Desiderio Pasolini detailed the questionable circumstances in which the pope’s formal authorization was carried out: In suo nome il Presidente di Romagna aveva aggravato la città con una nuova tassa di cinquanta scudi d’oro al mese, per pagare (così almeno diceva) la sua guardia svizzera. Il popolo tumultua: il Magistrato dei Savi si rifiuta al pagamento, e il Presidente relega a Cesena tutti i cittadini che ne fanno parte. Nel triste momento in cui Ravenna privata del suo magistrato cittadino, rimaneva paurosa ed indifesa, noi vediamo il Presidente di Romagna con due deputati dell’Accademia Fiorentina e con fidati maestri

102

Speaking Spirits

muratori recarsi di notte al mausoleo di Dante, e lì cheti cheti, quasi come ladri (per quanto avessero il permesso del Papa) faticosamente sollevare il coperchio dell’arca lapidea. Ma il sepolcro era vuoto!64 In his name the president of Romagna had burdened the city with a new tax of fifty gold scudi per month to pay for his Swiss guard (or at least this is what he said). The people rioted: the Magistrato dei Savi refused payment and the president relegated to Cesena all the citizens who had taken part. In that sad time when Ravenna was deprived of its citizen magistrates and remained fearful and undefended, we see the president of Romagna with two deputies of the Florentine Academy and trusted expert masons go by night to Dante’s tomb and there, ever so quietly almost like thieves (though they had the pope’s permission), lift with great effort the stone lid of the sarcophagus. But the tomb was empty!

Dante’s Remains Disappear until the Nineteenth Century Scholars have pieced together the available evidence, concluding that some priests at the confraternity of the Church of St Francis in Ravenna must have moved Dante’s remains to a more secure hiding place; then over the course of many generations the location of the remains was forgotten. Incidentally, the nineteenth century became another period of frequent claims by people to have seen or heard the spirit of Dante. According to records by various scholars, including Corrado Ricci and Catherine Mary Phillimore, which I piece together here, in May 1865, the then Sacristan of the Franciscan Church where Dante had been buried in Ravenna, Angelo Grillo, frequently slept in the ancient chapel of Bracciaforte. While he was asleep there, he purportedly experienced a recurring dream. He told many people about it, only to receive repeated indications of pitying disbelief or ridicule. Grillo maintained that he saw in his dream a shade issue forth from a corner of the chapel where a doorway had been structurally closed. Grillo attested that the ghost, wearing red, passed through the chapel and into the adjoining cemetery. When the ghost approached him, Grillo asked it to identify itself, and its reply was, “I am Dante.” The sacristan died that month – in May 1865. Only a

Divining Dante

103

few days afterwards, during renovations to the confraternity buildings, on 27 May, “in that very angle of the chapel where the doorway had been blocked, were found the bones of Dante”65 in a humble box marked with Dante’s name. This box is now preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Florentines had not given up trying to repatriate Dante’s bones in the 1860s, however. They petitioned the city of Ravenna to allow repatriation of the poet’s remains, but were still unsuccessful. The outcome was the same, but the reasoning behind the refusal had shifted notably. The response of city officials now rested on nationalistic grounds: “il deposito delle sacre ossa di Dante Alighieri in Ravenna non può pei destini felicemente mutati d’Italia, considerarsi come perpetuazione d’esilio, una essendo la legge che raccoglie con duraturo vincolo tutte le città italiane”66 (the deposit of the sacred bones of Dante Alighieri in Ravenna can no longer be considered a perpetuation of his exile, given the happily changed destinies of Italy, the single law that binds together in a lasting bond all the Italian cities). The poet whose post-mortem voice had once served to articulate a very different political position now served to herald a unified nation.67 At the solemn deposition of the relocated bones of Dante in their original sepulchre in Ravenna on 26 June 1865, Giambattista Giuliani, scholar of the Divina commedia at Florence’s Istituto degli Studi Superiori, recited one of the more patriotic nationalistic uses of Dante’s spirit for this age: Ed a voi, o benemeriti Ravennati, confidava le morte sue ossa, che poi nella tristizia de’ tempi parve s’involassero agli sguardi profani, ed or si rivelarono quasi a miracolo per giustificare il Vaticinio della sospirata unità e fortuna d’Italia. Siavi dunque raccomandato il Tesoro unico che la Nazione raffermò come suo, quando nel nome di Dante raccolse e riconobbe se stessa, e promise di risollevarsi nel consorzio delle genti civili.68 And to you, oh worthy people of Ravenna, Dante entrusted his dead bones that once in the sadness of the times had seemed to have fled from the sight of the profane. Now they reveal themselves almost as if by a miracle to justify the Prophecy of the wished for unity and fortune of Italy. May this sole Treasure continue to be entrusted to you which the Nation

104

Speaking Spirits

claimed as its own when in the name of Dante it gathered itself together and recognized itself, and promised to raise itself again in the consortium of civilized people.

But Giuliani did not stop there. He went on to report that the voice of Dante resounded in his own ear and seconded his exaltation of the new Italy as the greatest society in the world: Or quale voce mi suona dentro nell’anima a rapirmi fuor di me stesso? Poss’io aver merito e grazia a manifestarla? E chi mi vi astringe? È una voce, che arcanamente mi grida “profetizza tu di queste Ossa?” Oh eccelso spirito di Dante, oh padre mio, mio benefattore! Che mi dicono queste Ossa? Queste ossa mi dicono, che nel dolore si rigenerano gli uomini divinamente grandi, e le Nazioni, che per essi grandeggiano ad universale beneficio: queste ossa mi dicono, che il diritto de’ popoli sarà vendicato, cesserà insieme col servaggio l’ignominia dell’umana famiglia, e la fede regnerà nei cuori per risplendere nell’opere: queste Ossa mi dicono, che il Trionfo di Dante è preparazione ed augurio del pieno Trionfo d’Italia, e dell’ottima Civiltà del mondo.69 Now what voice sounds inside my soul and snatches me out of myself? Can I have the merit or grace to reveal it? And who holds me fast? It is a voice that shouts arcanely at me: “Do you prophesy of these bones?” Oh great spirit of Dante, oh father of mine, my benefactor! What do these bones say to me? These bones tell me that by means of pain, men are regenerated divinely great, and the nations that through them become greater, do so for the benefit of all. These bones tell me that the right of the people will be vindicated, that along with servitude will cease the ignominy of the human family, and faith will reign in our hearts in order to shine forth in our works. This is what the bones tell me, that the triumph of Dante is a preparation and a sign of the full triumph of Italy, and the greatest society of the world.

In this same year, Giuseppe Riminesi of Ferrara saw his own “visione” in print titled Dante Alighieri e Ravenna Carme con note illustrative anche sul rinvenimento delle sacre ceneri. In this poetic vision, Riminesi praised the people of Ravenna and the newly unified nation of Italy. In exultantly patriotic language, he summarized the triumphs and tribulations of Italy’s path to nationhood. He highlighted the sacrifice of Anita Garibaldi, also buried in Ravenna, and the great deeds for Italian Unification that General Giuseppe Garibaldi went

Divining Dante

105

on to accomplish. In the midst of his vision, Riminesi stated that suddenly a sound came from the pine forest near Ravenna and a cloud descended: e dentro quella Lo sdegnoso sembiante mi s’offerse Dell’Allighier – Lo ingegno non ridice Qual’io rimasi: tanto accende l’alma Inusato stupore e maraviglia:70 and inside that [cloud] faced me the haughty countenance of Alighieri – My mind cannot say how I remained – my soul was so fired up by unusual stupor and wonder.

Riminesi affirmed that the spirit of Dante said to him: “Fratello A che mia vista ti conturba? Amica larva io son, chè di patria l’amor santo Eterno vive oltre l’avello. Io primo Dal suo letargo ridestai l’Italia: La dissi nido di dolor. Sbattuta ‘Nave senza nocchiero in gran tempesta’ Non donna di provincie – E chi m’intese? Oh! cessâr l’ore del divin decreto, Che per mille anni a servitù dannava Del Teùtono il latin sangue gentile: Libertade ritorna, ed io rivivo.” “Brother, why does my appearance disturb you? I am a friendly spirit because the holy love of one’s country lives eternally beyond the grave. Before all others, I awakened Italy from her lethargy. I called her the nest of pain, rocked ‘ship without a helmsman in a terrible storm,’

106

Speaking Spirits

not a provincial lady – do you understand me? Oh! the hours of the divine decree are up that for a thousand years the genteel Latin blood was condemned to servitude under the barbarians: Liberty returns, and I am reborn.”

Dante’s spirit proceeds to emphasize the brotherhood of a unified Italy, and Riminesi’s composition begins to take the form of an extended praise of Italians (not terribly unlike Landino’s in 1481). Riminesi joins illustrious names of the past, including those of Marco Polo, Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Raphael, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, with closer contemporaries, including Ugo Foscolo, Giuseppe Parini, Giuseppe Verdi, Ennio Quirino Visconti, and many more. In short, Dante’s spirit heralds for Riminesi the unification of Italian culture, as well as her political nationalization.71 The Renaissance Consequences of Dante’s Failed Translation to Florence Many Renaissance Florentines nevertheless felt keenly the fallout of the failed attempts to repatriate Dante’s bones. One of many examples is a 1522 sonnet:72 El tuo fratel Leon sommo pastore Richiese dolcemente e Ravennesi, Credendo che del lor fussin chortesi, Non che dell’ossa del nostro oratore. Ma que’ ’l tolson via e portar fore: … Fiorenza a te ricorda et recha a mente Dante, lume et splendor della tua patria.73 Your brother Leo, greatest shepherd Sweetly asked those Ravennati, Believing that they were courteous, Nothing more than the bones of our orator. But they took them and hid them away: … Florence, remember and call to mind Dante, light and splendour of your homeland.

Divining Dante

107

In the diplomatic sphere, Florentines ultimately failed in their quest to have Dante’s remains translated to the city of his birth. The cenotaph that was eventually installed in Florence’s Church of Santa Croce in 1830 is to this day empty. But these were certainly not the only examples of their ideological and propagandistic use of Dante’s spirit.74 While Ravenna retained possession of Dante’s body, Florence claimed ever more possessively the great poet’s spirit. The Florentines’ victory in this battle of public perception in literary matters is attributable to many factors, not least of which is an emerging Florentine hegemony in the questione della lingua. But Dante’s spirit, in particular, as the Florentines represented it, lent its own authorial weight to what were otherwise rather arbitrary determinations of civic cultural superiority (witness, for instance, the myriad irresolvable “debates” concerning which of the Italian vernaculars is more beautiful or has greater potential for literary expression). What is more, key Renaissance Florentine authors, including Benivieni and Machiavelli, also came to rely on the authority of Dante’s spirit in their works in attempts to avoid Dante’s political fate of death in exile in their own politically threatened situations in the 1500s in narratives that will introduce the concerns of the next chapter.

3 Genius Loci: Exile, Citizenship, and the Place of Burial

But where repose the all Etruscan three – Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, The Bard of Prose, creative spirit! he Of the Hundred Tales of love – where did they lay Their bones, distinguish’d from our common clay In death as life? Are they resolv’d to dust, And have their country’s marbles nought to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust? Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore Their children’s children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages; and the crown Which Petrarch’s laureate brow supremely wore, Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled – not thine own. … Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore, Fortress of falling empire! honoured sleeps The immortal exile; – Arqua, too, her store Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, While Florence vainly begs her banish’d dead and weeps. – Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.496–531

In chapter 2 I examined a variety of ways in which Renaissance Italians sought to honour Dante. Some laboured to unite elements of Dante’s

Genius Loci

109

textual corpus; others wrote epideictic works concerning his life and legacy; and still others sought to relocate his burial place. Dante’s spirit was figured as aiding these efforts from beyond the grave. This chapter foregrounds four more examples of Italian Renaissance eidolopoeia that present different twists on the issues concerning Dante’s corpus and corpse, all of them with a particular focus on place. The first two cases concern questions of exile, official or self-imposed banishment from a beloved place. Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) invokes the spirit of Dante in his Discorso o dialogo intorno alla lingua nostra (Debate or Dialogue on Our Language, c. 1515) for various reasons, though I shall argue that a not inconsequential one is in order to make a stronger case for his own return from exile by associating himself with Dante and playing upon the Florentine guilt stemming from Dante’s sentence of exile more than two hundred years earlier. While Machiavelli was unsuccessful in his bid, Zaccaria Ferreri (1479–1524) had just two years earlier adopted a very similar – but this time apparently effective – narrative ploy in his Somnium Lugdunense de divi Leonis X (Dream in Lyon of the Heavenly Leo X, 1513), which permitted the cleric to return to his beloved Rome.1 The third example presents a kind of foil to Girolamo Benivieni’s invocation of the spirit of Dante to associate him more closely with his birth city. Two years after the “Cantico” was published, non-Florentine Jacopo Caviceo (1443–1511) conjured the spirit of Boccaccio. The proem of Caviceo’s Peregrino (Parma, 1508) figured a spirit with unusual post-mortem citizenship concerns. Finally, the fourth example returns to Florence with specific burial concerns. Reminiscent of the Platonic Academy’s representation of the Dante spirit that was unhappy with his tomb in Ravenna, Benivieni’s poetic representation of the spirit of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) also decried a shabby burial place. The ghostly voice of Pico claimed to want to move from outside Florence’s Church of San Marco to a more lavish tomb inside the church. The reasons why Benivieni resorted to eidolopoeia in this case are complicated and, I aim to show, perhaps also a bit chilling. Machiavelli’s Dialogo with Dante’s Spirit and the Question of Exile Machiavelli wrote his Discorso o dialogo intorno alla lingua nostra (also sometimes referred to simply as the Dialogo intorno alla lingua nostra, Dialogue concerning Our Language) from exile following the Medici

110

Speaking Spirits

restoration in 1512, which abruptly ended Machiavelli’s fourteen years of service in the Florentine republican government. Machiavelli’s sympathies during the previous piagnone government were with the arrabbiati/bigi faction of aristocratic, non-Medicean opposition,2 and the events of his life are well known. Girolamo Savonarola’s execution in May 1498 led to the change in government that propelled Machiavelli at the age of twenty-nine to the office of secretary of the Second Chancellery the following month and to that of secretary of the Dieci (the Ten of War) in July. Machiavelli was an eyewitness to key historical events of the period 1498–1512, including the Florentine war against Pisa, tense negotiations with Cesare Borgia the Duke of Valentinois, the reaction in Rome to the conclave in which Giuliano della Rovere was made Pope Julius II, and multiple delicate embassies including those to Lyon, Mantua, Siena, and Rome. Machiavelli also proposed the creation of a Florentine militia, under the Nine of Militia, of which he became the secretary in 1507. This militia helped to conquer Pisa in 1509, but could not withstand the greater and more experienced military forces mobilizing against the republic. The government under gonfaloniere Piero Soderini fell apart soon after the disastrous Florentine loss during the Battle of Prato in August 1512. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici with Spanish military forces marched on Tuscany, prompting Soderini to flee Florence. In November 1512, Machiavelli was stripped of his official duties, dismissed from the chancery, and prohibited from entering the palace of government for a year, during which he was also not to leave Florentine territories. Early in 1513, however, he was arrested on suspicion of participation in the republican conspiracy led by Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi. He suffered torture by the rope six times – likely resulting in pulled or dislocated arms – and was released from prison twenty-two days after his arrest when a general amnesty was declared, commemorating the ascension of Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X. Machiavelli then sought refuge on a small family farm just south of Florence, where he would pen a number of his works, including the Dialogo, which is the present focus of attention. Not unlike Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, Machiavelli’s Dialogo opens with an extended meditation on honouring one’s country. In fact, Machiavelli states, “l’uomo non ha maggiore obbligo nella vita sua che con quella” (Man has no greater obligation in his life than that [that is, than to honour one’s homeland]).3 It follows then, he continues, that the writer who by his character or works makes himself an enemy of

Genius Loci

111

the state “meritamente si può chiamare parricida” (212; can rightly be called a parricide). These are strong words. Machiavelli’s motivations for writing them may have contained a self-serving element: he probably hoped that a fervent appeal to civic patriotism would set him apart from the other openly embittered Florentine exiles and rouse sympathy for his return among influential residents within the city or with the Medicean Papal See. Machiavelli moves from broad patriotic declamations in the opening paragraphs to the Dialogo’s central question: whether the language in which the greatest Florentine poets and orators wrote was Florentine, Tuscan, or Italian. The debate certainly has important literary, linguistic, and cultural ramifications, as have been detailed by scholars.4 Nonetheless, the questione is not without its potential political consequences, as well. Machiavelli is eager to show that, in spite of his arrest, torture, and sentence of exile by Florentines in power, he is not a parricide and is not going to defame his city. In fact, he argues the view that Florentine authors wrote specifically in Florentine, and that certain “Lombards”5 were simply envious or overly presumptuous in claiming that the Three Crowns in particular wrote in their tongue – that is, northern Italian: Il Boccaccio afferma nel Centonovelle di scrivere in vulgar fiorentino; il Petrarca non so che ne parli cosa alcuna; Dante in un suo libro ch’ei fa De vulgari eloquio, dove egli danna tutta la lingua particolar d’Italia, afferma non avere scritto in fiorentino ma in una lingua curiale. (215–16) Boccaccio affirms in his Centonovelle [the Decameron] that he writes in the Florentine vernacular; I do not know that Petrarch says anything at all on the topic; Dante in his book, De vulgari eloquentia, where he condemns all the separate languages of Italy, affirms not to have written in Florentine, but in a broader, courtly Italian.

Machiavelli hastens to add, however, that Dante speaks in this way because he continues to feel insulted by Florentines for the ignominy of exile: “tanto l’offese l’ingiuria dell’esilio! tanta vendetta ne desiderava! e però ne fece tanta quanta egli poté” (216; so great did the insult of exile offend him! so great was his desire for revenge! for that reason he did all that he possibly could). But Fortune, either to make a liar out of him (“per farlo mendace,” 216) or to re-cover in glory the city slandered by him (“per ricoprire con la gloria sua la

112

Speaking Spirits

calunnia falsa di quello,” 216), made the city so prosperous that its fame extended to all regions of the world. If only Dante could see his error in predicting evil for his city, Machiavelli claims, he would wish to be resuscitated from the dead in order to repent, only to want to die again of the embarrassment brought about by his envy: “se Dante la vedessi [Firenze all’epoca di Machiavelli], o egli accuserebbe se stesso o, ripercosso dai colpi di quella sua innata invidia, vorrebbe, essendo risuscitato, di nuovo morire” (216; if Dante were to see her [Florence in Machiavelli’s time], either he would accuse himself, or, buffeted by the blows of that innate envy of his, he would like, having been resuscitated, to die again).6 While Machiavelli does not literally resuscitate Dante, he does do so literarily. He figures the spirit of Dante, calling on it to affirm the argument that he sets forth in the first pages of the Dialogo, that is, to confirm that Dante wrote the Commedia in the Florentine language. From this point, the “dialogue” more closely resembles the transcript of a courtroom interrogation in which Machiavelli plays the role of sapient prosecutor and “Dante” the rather badgered defendant. When the summoned spirit asserts that he wrote the Commedia in “curiale,” Machiavelli insists that Dante’s spirit explain what that means. “Vuol dire una lingua parlata dagli uomini di corte del papa, del duca, i quali per essere uomini litterati parlono meglio che non si parla nelle terre particulari d’Italia” (219; It means the language spoken by the men of the papal or ducal courts who, because they are educated men, speak better than would one from any particular area of Italy). Machiavelli forwards various citations from Dante’s poem as evidence that disproves the spirit’s words. The spirit eventually admits, “Egli è il vero, e io ho il torto” (222; That is true, and I am wrong). This climactic admission from Dante’s spirit serves to affirm what has been already argued, but it also propels forward Machiavelli’s subsequent soliloquy, which culminates in a scathing critique of “outsiders” (mostly non-Florentine Italians) who attempt to imitate Dante’s Florentine language in writing their own works: Concludesi pertanto che non c’è lingua che si possa chiamare o comune d’Italia o curiale, perché tutte quelle che si potessino chiamare così hanno il fondamento loro dagli scrittori fiorentini e dalla lingua fiorentina: alla quale in ogni defetto, come a vero fonte e fondamento loro, è necessario che ricorrino; e non volendo essere veri pertinaci, hanno a confessar la fiorentina esser questo fondamento e fonte. (228)

Genius Loci

113

Let us conclude, then, that there is no language that can be considered common to Italy, or a language of the court, for those languages that might be called such have their source in the language and writers of Florence, to whom they must resort, even in its defects, as their true source and foundation. And if they are not really stubborn, they must confess that their foundation and source is indeed Florentine.

The author then represents Dante’s spirit as capitulating and agreeing with him: “le confessò vere [le cose che ebbe udito] et si partì” (228; he confessed [that the things he heard were] true and left). In doing so, Machiavelli effectively coerces a palinodic confession from “Dante” from the other world, since he figures the spirit as admitting that an opinion Dante held during his lifetime was wrong. Machiavelli adds, “Non so già s’io mi sgannerò coloro che sono sì poco conoscitori de’ benefici ch’egli hanno auti dalla nostra patria, che e’ vogliono accumunare con essa lei nella lingua Milano, Vinegia, Romagna, e tutte le bestemmie di Lombardia” (228; I do not know whether I will release from their [self-] deception those who are so unrecognizant of the benefits they have received from our city that with the Florentine language they want to lump together those others of Milan, Venice, and the Romagna, as well as all those vulgarities of Lombardy). At this point, however, it may almost be less important for Machiavelli to draw the stubborn ingrates to his theoretical side on the questione della lingua than it is for him to succeed in associating himself with Dante’s textual and political legacy. It is important to recall the way in which Machiavelli framed his discourse from the outset: he loves Florence, has served for many years on behalf of Florentine citizens, and intends to dispel any notion that he might be a parricide. He firmly wishes to return, and to do so he needs to secure the lifting of his sentence. What is Machiavelli to gain, however, in associating himself with the spirit of a man whom he accuses in various passages of the Dialogo of lying (“mendace,” 216; “Tu dirai le bugie” [220; You must be telling lies]), and madness (“pazzo,” 217)? How is his aim strengthened by approximating his situation to a predecessor’s whose language is described as “goffo” (awkward), “porco” (filthy), and “osceno” (obscene, all mentioned on page 222)? In this work Machiavelli is certainly not attempting, as did the other Florentine praisers of Dante examined in the previous chapter, to so exalt the words and actions of Dante that they come close to making Dante’s life resemble hagiography. Instead, Machiavelli’s “Dante” admits to being wrong; the spirit

114

Speaking Spirits

acknowledges a mistaken belief while in an agitated state of mind during the period of exile, a mistake which it wishes now to correct. Perhaps Machiavelli believed that this figuration was a way of humanizing Dante by emphasizing Dante’s need to be “sgannato” (released from his [self-] deception), so that others might be more likely to pardon also in Machiavelli those acts or words attributed to him in service of his city, but during the governmental rule of a hostile political party. According to this line of thought, if Machiavelli were to succeed in making a close association between Dante and himself, then his exile might be seen as an unfortunate repetition in Florentine minds of Dante’s regrettable exile in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Moreover, by setting the dialogue with “Dante” not in the gardens of a Florentine villa or in an otherworldly realm (the Elysian Fields), for example, but rather in a setting more reminiscent of a courtroom or an interrogation room, Machiavelli might have wanted to suggest the potential real-world consequences (for his sentence of exile) in a work that might otherwise be underrated as a mere academic or theoretical discourse on language. Furthermore, by fictively conjuring a dead man who speaks, Machiavelli may be implying that those currently in power do not have the final word, either. The Spirit of Dante Is Invoked to Help Bring about the End of Another Exile Like Machiavelli, Zaccaria Ferreri wrote his Somnium Lugdunense de divi Leonis X from exile and in his fiction interacted with a spirit of Dante. Nevertheless, the two examples are very different in almost every way: the form of Ferreri’s work is a 1,030-line poem rather than a prose dialogue; its language is Latin, as opposed to the Florentine vernacular; and the author is a zealous Benedictine church reformer not aiming to return to Florence. In this 1513 Somnium, Ferreri fashions a pardon received directly from the spirit of Dante in the hopes of convincing the Medici pope to whom his work is dedicated to permit him to be reintegrated in the Church and to return to Rome from France. Vicentine by birth, Ferreri studied in Padua and entered the Benedictine monastery of St Justina of Padua at fifteen years of age. In 1504 he went to Rome, where, after just two years, he was conferred degrees in theology and civil and canon law.7 Although he returned to his monastic cell in Padua and likely would have preferred a quiet life of study, circumstances, including clashes with his superior, led him in 1510 to a

Genius Loci

115

more public role, and he joined the retinue of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, Milanese condottiero at the service of the French. Ferreri’s own political sympathies leaned toward the French and against the Venetians, as is evident from his poem “De Gallico in Venetos triumpho” (On the French Triumph over Venice), composed during this period. Pope Julius II’s change of alliances during the War of the League of Cambrai (from an alliance with the French to one with Venice) put Ferreri in an awkward position. He joined a cadre of influential members of the Catholic hierarchy calling in 1511 for reform of the Church, and he became the author of the acts of the Council of Costanza and the acts of a number of subsequent councils (including the Decreta et acta Concilii Basiliensis and the Apologia sacri Pisani Concilii moderni). Pope Julius II responded to the reformers’ zeal to dismiss him by stripping Ferreri and many of the other reformers of their religious offices in October 1511 and then excommunicating them in January 1512. Further councils were moved to Asti and Lyon, but rapidly disintegrated. When Pope Julius II died in February 1513, some of the other reformers quickly found favour and reintegration in the Church under Pope Leo X, but Ferreri was not immediately among them. It was in this context that Ferreri penned his Somnium. In this work, he presents a vision of the heavenly spheres, influenced in some ways by Dante’s Paradiso. In fact, the narrator encounters the spirit of Dante in the sphere of Mars, and this spirit will then serve as a kind of guide for Ferreri through some other heavenly spheres in his dream vision.8 Dante’s spirit, the “dive senex” (line 257; blessed old man) crowned with laurel, explains to the narrator the presence on Mars of five allegorical ladies – representing Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and Asia – in terms of current events (including the 1511 Council of Pisa and the War of the League of Cambrai) and why Italy is destined to be the happiest of all. Italy, the spirit of Dante indicates, has the most to gain and the greatest hope in the ascendant Medici Pope Leo X. In this representation of the spirit of Dante, Ferreri emphasizes Dante’s strength and ability to endure and overcome the challenges he faced during life, especially that of exile, which is foregrounded in the way the spirit identifies itself in lines 274–6 of the poem: … Esilium tolerare domoque exire coactus Pluribus erravi terris peregrinus, et hospes. Ille ego sum Dantes …

116

Speaking Spirits

… forced to leave home and endure exile I have wandered over many lands as a foreigner and guest. I am that Dante …

As Machiavelli also does in his eidolopoeia of Dante, Ferreri presents a spirit of Dante not without its shortcomings. In particular, Ferreri makes the spirit of Dante retract the views he had expressed in the De monarchia (On the Monarchy), which contained opinions discordant with Ferreri’s own: Ipse monarchaeam dicens fore Caesaris unam, et Terrenum imperium nil dependere Latino A patre, qui toto Christi vice praesidet orbe, Erravi (tamen absque dolo) multisque diebus Ante mihi quam se facerent empyrea tecta Cognita (lines 291–6) Before the hidden Empyrean made itself known to me I erred for many days (albeit without deliberate deceit) In saying that there would be one monarchy of Caesar, and and that earthly sovereignty did not depend on the Latin father Who presides over all the world in the manner of Christ.

The dialogue between the narrator and Dante’s spirit continues in the sphere of Jupiter, nicely summarized by Charles L. Stinger: the two poets glimpse in the distance a lofty palace surrounded by high walls that Dante identifies as the Mons Vaticanus. Climbing for a better vantage-point they then see set before them the walls of the Borgo Leonino, the Tiber and Hadrian’s tomb, the Capitoline, Aventine, Coelian and other hills, the marvelous Pantheon, and the obelisks, columns, and other distinctive monuments of Rome. At length they enter the gates of the Vatican to join the throngs joyously acclaiming the new pontiff. For Ferreri, it seems, no better way offered itself to ingratiate himself with Leo X than to present the wondrous splendors of the papal capital, appropriately transported from earth to the heavenly sphere of Jupiter, from which the pontiff, Jove-like in his just command of heaven and earth, rules the world.9

The celebration is not merely for Giovanni de’ Medici’s ascension to the papacy, however, since Ferreri aims to do more than praise or flatter

Genius Loci

117

the new and powerful vicar of Christ. The work is also a public confession, and in the way that Ferreri writes the work, he has the spirit of Dante – already blessed in heaven – command him to atone for the part he played in the Council of Pisa: (Obsecro) quamprimum fuge de squallentibus umbris Conciliablaeae gentis. Iam ad corda reversus Errores agnosce graves, gemituque patenti Dilue tot maculas; clemens tibi namque sacerdos Indulgebit (lines 858–62)10 (I beseech you) flee as soon as possible from the squalid shades of the people of the Council. Acknowledge your serious mistakes, and with manifest groaning wash away those many sins; for the merciful priest will be kind to you.

In Ferreri’s case, he hoped to end not only his residence in France in the aftermath of the Council of Pisa, but also his “exile” from full priestly “citizenship.” In the end, his poem seems to have served its purpose: Pope Leo X welcomed him to Rome, lifted the excommunication, reinstated his priestly duties, and made him a domestic prelate. Ferreri thus joined the company of Pietro Bembo and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini in the papal court. In 1518 the pope made Ferreri archbishop of Sebaste (Sivas in modern-day Turkey) and bishop of Guardialfiera (Campobasso).11 The positions permitted Ferreri to undertake subsequent diplomatic missions on behalf of the Holy See, which he would perform to significant acclaim especially in Poland and Lithuania. He died in 1524. It is interesting that soon after Ferreri dedicated an example of Dantean eidolopoeia to Pope Leo X, his exile was lifted, while Machiavelli’s Dialogo did not bring about the same result. Not for this reason should one assume that Ferreri’s work is superior to Machiavelli’s – both texts in my opinion fall far short of the distinction of literary masterpiece. Nor should one deduce that Machiavelli’s skills of persuasion were not as keen. To what degree Ferreri’s narrative was itself instrumental in the pope’s decision is also debatable. In fact, I believe that Pope Leo X was perhaps more inclined to pardon and reinstate a penitent “reformer” whose critique had focused on the political decisions of his papal predecessor than he was to forgive lightly a Florentine ex-chancellery secretary

118

Speaking Spirits

accused of conspiring directly against Medici interests, regardless of how crafty or flattering any eidolopoetic argument he might receive could be. Nonetheless, the fact that Italians during this period resort to eidolopoeia so frequently suggests that at least in general terms (if not specific cases) they believed the rhetorical strategy to have a reasonable potential for persuasive success. In the previous chapter, I underscored how Florentines sought to seize the spirit of Dante, when they failed to have his body, by associating the exiled Dante as closely as possible with his homeland. In fact, one of the most boldly stated expressions of the Florentine position came as early as 1467 from Ficino in his proem to the De Monarchia (On Monarchy) translation. Dante, Ficino wrote, “illustrò tanto la città fiorentina, che così bene Firenze di Dante come Dante di Firenze si può dire” (made the Florentine city so famous that one could just as well say the “Florence of Dante” as “Dante of Florence”). Moreover, according to Ficino, citizens like Dante who currently find themselves outside the city walls are better called pilgrims or wanderers, since their exile is not permanent.12 In this way Ficino attempted to soften what turned out to be for the historical Dante a condemnation to perpetual exile. Ficino was suggesting that the Florentines of his day would appreciate Dante and treat him better than Dante’s contemporaries did, a view that other Florentines would repeatedly rearticulate. Subsequent writers, including Machiavelli and Ferreri, both of whom suffered in exile for different ideological reasons, tried to harness the rhetorical potential of Florentine guilt over Dante’s treatment during his life by evoking his spirit. While individual storytellers who figured the spirit of Dante in their writing met with varying degrees of success in leveraging the power of the authorial idol for their purposes, in general Florentines succeeded in associating Dante with their city, and to some extent this was true of the other two Crowns. As the next section shows, though, Boccaccio’s spirit was nevertheless contested by a well-known nonFlorentine Italian. Jacopo Caviceo Claims to See the Ghost of Boccaccio Jacopo Caviceo’s Peregrino enjoyed great success, as evidenced by twentyone Italian editions, nine French translations, and three Spanish translations during its first fifty-one years in printed circulation.13 The bestselling sentimental prose romanzo relates a proto-Romeo-and-Juliet story of

Genius Loci

119

the star-crossed lovers Peregrino and Genevera. Caviceo tells their tale with brio in a delightful array of narrative modes, including amatory epistles, philosophical digressions that anticipate later Renaissance dialogues in love treatises, autobiographical references, seemingly realistic courtroom dramas, and outlandish adventure tales. After Peregrino endures many trials, including abduction by pirates, dangerous trips to the Orient and to Hell, almost insurmountable obstacles erected by Genevera’s family, and wild intrigues of all kinds, the bumbling protagonist finally unites in marriage with his beloved. But their marital bliss endures only a short time: Genevera dies soon afterward in childbirth, and Peregrino quickly follows her to the tomb, succumbing to broken-hearted grief. The work appears part Boccaccian romance, but also part prose Orlando furioso and part Benvenuto Cellini Vita, avant la lettre.14 In this section, I analyse the work’s brief proem in full, as well as key excerpts from the romanzo, which help to illustrate attitudes toward death, commemoration, citizenship, and civic culture in Caviceo’s day. The two-page proem of the Peregrino opens with Caviceo describing how he fell asleep and dreamed that he found himself wandering through the Elysian Fields: “oppresso da un dolce sopore, me parve vedere una umbra, a la quale il campo helvsio faceva honore” (3–4; weighed down by a sweet sleepiness, it seemed to me I saw a shade honoured by the Elysian Fields). Similar to other spirit narratives already examined, this one features an author and character with the same name; Caviceo the author describes his dream vision, while Caviceo the character witnesses a ghost within a dream. Seeing the spirit, Caviceo’s character wants to scream, but cannot because he is “tutto spaventato … a guisa de Huomo che per freda febre langue” (completely scared … like a man who suffers from a cold fever). Caviceo’s character begs the spirit, which he assumes is blessed (“o beata umbra”), to identify itself before he himself “gives up the ghost”: “dimi per cortesia qual sei, aciò che, di paura oppresso, non sia constrecto a lassare il spirito” (tell me please what you are so that I, seized by fear, am not forced to give up my spirit). The spirit satisfies his request: “Vivendo informai il corpo di Zanbochaccio da Certaldo. Hora son facta cittadina et incola de la docta cità di Ferrara, per contemplare una non più vista belleza” (Living I informed the body of Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo. Now I am a citizen and resident of the wise city of Ferrara, where I can contemplate an extraordinary beauty). Thus the character of Caviceo meets the spirit of Boccaccio,

120

Speaking Spirits

whose very first words specify that he was born in Certaldo and that now (“hora”) he is a citizen and resident of Ferrara, because there he can better admire the lovely surroundings, perhaps most especially the renowned beauty of the Duchess of Ferrera, Lucretia Borgia, to whom he dedicates the work. The proem proceeds with lavish praise of Ferrara and its ducal family, which regularly produces “pontefici maximi romani, duci, baroni e semidei, e gente militare che a Marte in militia non cederebeno, né a Cesare de fortuna, né a Pompeio de gloria” (Roman pontiffs, dukes, barons, and demigods, and soldiers who would not yield to Mars in battle, nor to Caesar in fortune, nor to Pompey in glory). With a flourish of encomiastic rhetoric, Caviceo praises Boccaccio’s – and his own – new city of residence, Ferrara, “patria gloriosa, nutrita tra le felicità letteraria e de boni costume” (a glorious state, nourished on literary greatness and good customs). This dream with its Ferrarese associations prompts the memory of an earlier dream that Caviceo claims to have had on the very first night he moved to Ferrara to serve as vicar general: dicato fu’ per Flasio Rovorella, amplissimo primato ravennate, a la cura de le cose suae spirituale [a la] inclita cità de Ferrara. Ne la qualle come gionto vi fu’, la prima nocte, in quella hora che Mercurio suolle bindare il capo a l’huomo de rossata lethea, audì cridare: “Mercè per dio, che morto e vivo sempre sto morto. O dio exaltato, soccorre a la gran pena, quale extinguere non può né ’l cello, né il libro arbitrio, né l’humana virtù. O mondo troppo ciecho, o caduca nostra forma, ove conducto me havete, che più respirare non posso?” Ombra mia, sento la dilecta de Titon tochare il primo orizonta de lo occeano. Perhò attende: il tutto da me intenderai. I was called by F[i]lasio Rovorella [archbishop of Ravenna], most generous pre-eminent man of Ravenna, to undertake spiritual matters in the noble city of Ferrara. On the day that I arrived there, the first night, in that hour when Mercury usually circles man’s head with rosy oblivion, I heard the cry [from the protagonist Peregrino], “Mercy, by God, that dead or alive I’m still dead! O exalted God, come to my aid in so great pain, which cannot be relieved nor escaped by free will or human virtue. O, too blind world, o fleeting fame of ours, where have you brought me that I can no longer breathe?” Shade of mine, I feel Tithonus’ delight touch the first horizon of the ocean. So pay attention, you will hear from me the whole account.

Genius Loci

121

In this intricate dream-within-a-dream, the fictitious character Peregrino (who will turn out to be recounting his adventures from beyond the grave) is said to appear and to recount his circuitous story to the character Caviceo, whose historical biography did indeed include a stint as vicar general of Ferrera. The dream narrative takes place over the course of three nights comprising what will become the three parts of the Peregrino. It is no wonder that in his own narrative frame Caviceo calls upon none other than Boccaccio, master of the complicated cornice. Paralleling Caviceo’s dual role of storyteller and character, Peregrino also has two distinct voices. Besides that of protagonist, he serves as narrator, since he tells Caviceo his story in a dream over the course of three nights. Of course Boccaccio also has two roles: esteemed author in his own right and the eidolopoetic Ferrara-promoting spirit in the Peregrino’s proem. The proem alludes, as I just noted, to autobiographical aspects of Caviceo’s experience, including his service in Ferrara at the request of Rovorella, so a more detailed understanding of Caviceo’s life should help to clarify the underlying premise of this proem and other passages of the Peregrino as a whole.15 Born in Parma in 1443, Caviceo began the study of law in Bologna, but was such a general troublemaker that he had to leave the university before finishing his degree in order to avoid official expulsion. Soon afterwards, probably in the early 1460s, he undertook an ecclesiastical career, despite the fact that evidence of a true vocation appears entirely lacking. The supreme tact of his biographer, Lorenza Simona, comes to the fore with her understated description of a long period in Caviceo’s life as “questa parentesi così poca lusinghiera”16 (this parenthesis that is not so very flattering). Caviceo purportedly seduced nuns under his protection. He also gravely wounded a man in an altercation, likely precipitated by his uncontrollable temper. Arrested, Caviceo faced charges, but settled for “voluntary exile,” which actually seems closer to going on the lam, running from the law first to Verona, then to Venice, then to Byzantium. After his three-year trip, which ended around 1469, Caviceo was back in Parma, seemingly doing his best to disturb the peace. Simona tracks a series of conflicts, disturbances, and political intrigues in delineating Caviceo’s character profile.17 Most notably, a disagreement with Bishop Giacomo Antonio Della Torre landed Caviceo behind bars. Caviceo’s friends, who might more aptly be described as thugs, ended up assaulting the bishop in an attempt to “liberate” Caviceo from jail. Not even Caviceo’s direct appeal to Pope Paul II could prevent his transfer to a prison in Alexandria,

122

Speaking Spirits

Egypt, from which he was soon released thanks to the intercession of a certain unnamed influential friend. After this episode, from roughly 1472 until his period of service as vicar general of Ravenna, ending around 1500, his ecclesiastical career advanced at a generally steady rate, marred only by a few setbacks – the fallout after his patrons (of the Rossi family, rulers of Parma) were sent into exile in 1482, and Caviceo’s expulsion from Conegliano after he unsuccessfully sought a position with the Venetian doge Marco Barbarigo. Barbarigo’s brother, Antonio, took over Caviceo’s duties in 1491 and compared him to the plague: “pessimam naturam et modos malignos … Iacobi Cavicaci istic comorantis, et quod dum istic permanebit nonnisi ab eo potest provenire nisi pestilens morbus” ([He has] the lowest nature and evil ways … That Jacopo Caviceo should be remembered, and he should be made to remain elsewhere, since his return would be like that of a deadly plague).18 Caviceo nonetheless acquired various benefices and moved from the position of vicar general in Rimini (1492–4) to Ravenna (but residing in Ferrara, 1494–1500) and then to vicar general of Archbishop Rinaldo Orsini in Florence, but only briefly. By the end of 1501, Caviceo had already been demoted to Siena and Montecchio, between which he performed his last services, dying in Montecchio in 1511.19 The work’s namesake, Peregrino (Pilgrim), hints at an allegorical level of the text, underscoring that this romanzo might also be an account of Everybody’s journey through life with an eye on the afterlife.20 The name of the beloved, Genevera, which significantly is not Ginevra, also undergoes deliberate etymological scrutiny and interpretation in the text: “Genevera, che al iudicio mio altro significare non vuole, se non che de ogni humana cosa creata egli è vera genetrice” (8; Genevera, which in my estimation cannot signify other than that she is the true genetrix of every human created thing). Nonetheless, if Caviceo intended his work as an allegory, it remains a wilfully obscure one, since little more than these names aid in accessing that narrative level. The work could not more emphatically differ from the typical medieval moralizing allegory either, despite the author’s high clerical position. While the romanzo, which spans 364 pages in Luigi Vignali’s edition, claims to instruct its readers on how to avoid the snares of love, its message is highly ambivalent and far from preachy. In fact, overall, the story might more readily impart lessons on how to revel in the less than noble pursuits of carnal love. The true progenetrix is not the Virgin Mary, but

Genius Loci

123

Genevera, object of lust, who dies giving birth to the fruit of an emphatically sexual union.21 The romanzo itself begins with the protagonist Peregrino meditating on the difficulty of remembering past joys: “E come il rememorare le cose piacevole et ioconde presta a l’anima consolata letitia, così il repetere le triste et odiose afflige e consuma il spirito. E ben che io creda per la intense memoria recidivare in doglia, ogni extreme delibero patire per te gratificare” (5; Just as remembering pleasant and joyous things grants consoling happiness to the soul, so repeating sad and odious things afflicts and consumes the spirit. And though I believe I shall relapse into grief at the intense memories, I am resolved to suffer every extreme to please you). His opening words obliquely recall another lover who was anything but chaste – Dante’s “Francesca da Rimini,” whose words also emphasize the fact that retelling her story will cause her pain, though she wishes to please her listener: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore. Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange e dice.” (Inf. 5.121–6) “There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness; and this your teacher knows. But if you have so much desire to know the first root of our love, I will do as one who weeps and speaks.”22

Moreover, the sharp irony of the work’s characterization as a chaste love story also soon becomes obvious as the reader faces various accounts of the protagonist’s almost unrestrained lust, which include an unabashedly erotic description of Peregrino’s escapade one night not to Genevera’s bedroom, as he had planned, but by mistake to the house of Leonora, his beloved’s neighbour, who until Peregrino’s visit was a virgin.23 The frame’s setting is also significantly not the Christian afterworld, but the pagan Elysian Fields. The whole story of the wanderer protagonist issues from the narrative fantasy of a man sleeping inside his very modest home. This domestic image contrasts with the civic concerns and the erring and exile that pervade the entire work. Moreover, the protagonist’s journey does not end back at home; it ends, instead, in a

124

Speaking Spirits

kind of limbo – to which I will return – in which souls, like Boccaccio’s, focus on establishing residency elsewhere. Death is almost a character in itself in this work, evoked in ways that effectively take away its sting – not because it heralds an eternal blessedness, but because it seems hardly to differ from life. In the proem, both the spirit of Boccaccio and Peregrino the narrator tell their stories from beyond the grave and both also make a point of highlighting this fact. “Boccaccio” emphatically contrasts verbal tenses: “vivendo informai … Hora son facta cittadina” (3; Living I possessed the body of Boccaccio … Now I am a citizen),24 and Peregrino’s first words are a cry whose tone hints at both the melodramatic and the slapstick: “Mercè per Dio, che morto e vivo sempre sto morto” (4, Mercy, by God, that living or dead, I’m still dead). Moreover, the work’s dedicatee, Lucretia Borgia, is twice referred to in the proem as the Phoenix, the mythological bird that repeatedly rises from its ashes (4; “O che adiuto darebbe questa unica Phenice a la tua cadente musa,” O what aid this unique Phoenix would lend to your fallen muse, and “serai una perpetua Phenice,” you will be a perpetual Phoenix). Like the ghosts, resuscitated versions of Boccaccio the author and Peregrino the protagonist, the Phoenix is a figure that transgresses the natural order of life and death. Caviceo may intend much more than a gallant literary compliment to his patroness, the Duchess of Ferrara, in associating her with the Phoenix and its implications of perpetual rejuvenation and immortality. By 1508, Pope Alexander VI’s illegitimate daughter had already seen herself rise from the ashes of two husbands before she married Duke Alfonso d’Este (Giovanni Sforza and Alfonso d’Aragona), the first a scandalous divorce and the second a gruesome murder, most likely ordered, if not committed, by her brother Cesare Borgia. The same year proved to be a particularly emotional one for Lucretia for at least two important reasons. Happily, she bore her first Estense son after two crushing miscarriages. But second, one of her favourite admirers, the Latin poet Ercole Strozzi, was found murdered only thirteen days after his marriage to Barbara Torelli. Malicious but presumably ill-founded voices implicated Lucretia Borgia’s jealousy in this event. Caviceo maintains a high degree of ambiguity in his actual references to literary emblems like the Phoenix. The entire work seems charged with an almost electric tension, a pull between wildly fantastic elements and, potentially, an utterly raw commentary on contemporary situations that deserves more attention from literary scholars.

Genius Loci

125

Immediately following the proem is the author’s envoi to his book: “Libro mio, se aspernato o reiecto fusti, dire poterai: ‘Lectore, non l’exterminio de Troia, non le fortune di Roma, non li errori de Ulyxe, ma de uno pudico amore la historia porto e narro’” (3; My book, if you are scorned or rejected, you could say: “Reader, not the destruction of Troy, nor the fortunes of Rome, nor the aimless wandering of Ulysses, do I tell, but the account of a chaste love”). It is probably not an accident that Caviceo’s words echo closely Landino’s concerning Dante in his proem to the 1481 edition of the Commedia: “Ma con tale eloquenzia non gl’errori d’Ulisse, non le battaglie troiane scrisse, non la venuta d’Enea in Italia … nelle quali cose veggiamo Omero e Virgilio essersi tanto affaticati” (But with such eloquence he did not write the errings of Ulysses, nor the battles of Troy, nor the arrival of Aeneas in Italy … in such things we see Homer and Virgil so exert themselves).25 In these first words, Caviceo-author speaks directly to his book and dictates how the book may defend itself as it circulates in public. The author emphasizes both his role as recitatore or actor, and his role as scribe, one who writes simply what he hears (“come intese, scriptse”). In short, the author puts on the mask of a faithful scribe, and thus declares from the outset his unreliability as a narrator. The book overtly refuses comparison with the great epics of Homer and Virgil, opting for the comic mode of a “love” story between humble characters. That the work ends not with Peregrino and Genevera’s marriage, but with their deaths and reunion in the afterworld, provides an unusual spin on the notion of a comedy and on the commonplace of “living happily ever after.” The “hook” of the Peregrino – and what must have helped to propel its popularity in the Cinquecento – is its playful juxtaposition of real and imaginary elements. The frame blurs the boundaries between historical people and events from Caviceo’s own life, such as his move to Ferrara to take up an ecclesiastical position at the request of Rovorella, and the realm of the unreal, marked here by the ghostly speeches. The same breakdown of boundaries pervades the entire Peregrino. By the closing chapter of the work, the two fictitious protagonists, Peregrino and Genevera, now deceased, arrive at the Elysian Fields and meet a number of notable historical figures there, including the murdered Ercole Strozzi and Filippo Beroaldo the Elder (Bologna, 1453–1505), the renowned classicist and professor of rhetoric and poetry in Bologna,26 as well as Pico and Ficino. Through the juxtaposition of real and imaginary, Caviceo fashions other juxtapositions, particularly between the relatively obscure and significantly

126

Speaking Spirits

non-Florentine figures (like Strozzi and Beroaldo) and the major voices associated with the Florentine Accademia (Pico and Ficino). By placing these four writers on the same narrative plane with the spirit of Boccaccio and his own embedded life story, Caviceo may be attempting to write himself into a literary genealogy with them. Caviceo even emphasizes the potentially more authoritative status of his work as “dead literature” by feigning its telling through a departed shade. The afterlife, according to Caviceo’s description of the Elysian Fields in the proem and in the final chapter of the Peregrino, is a kind of literary limbo, akin to the one described in Inferno 4, but with more modernized interlocutors. The souls of the literati remain in a highly mobile state of exile, never achieving a state of eternal rest. The name of the protagonist, Peregrino, calls to mind one journeying out of piety and penance, and more broadly conjures an image of worldly homelessness, a wandering quality not unlike Caviceo’s own highly migratory existence. The geographical non-fixity of literary giants, such as Boccaccio, Pico, and Ficino, has particularly significant consequences for Caviceo’s purposes. He can signal what he perceives to be a new direction of literary development outside of Florence by making some of its most notable literary representatives wander through the Elysian Fields or praise Ferrarese pre-eminence. Caviceo tellingly glosses over Boccaccio’s identification with Florentine culture. He deliberately states that “Boccaccio” was originally from Certaldo and now, after death, is a resident of Ferrara. Likewise, Peregrino hails from Mantua but now resides in Ferrara, and Caviceo from Parma also now resides in Ferrara. The proem, a frame intending to package the Peregrino as a way of influencing reader reception, announces from the outset that what may have been seen as a Florentine literary hegemony has shifted, signalled by the civic renunciation of one of Florence’s Three Crowns. Caviceo’s adoption of Boccaccio’s spirit, I argue, may serve to claim linguistic freedom from the strongly Florentine trend. In this way, the move of Boccaccio’s spirit to Ferrara may signal the shift from a literary language based on the highly developed Florentine vernacular to the northern Italian Latinate language Caviceo prefers, and which receives the brunt of Pietro Bembo’s linguistic criticism in proximate years. Focal interests of Caviceo’s proem find rearticulation and development in the body of the romanzo itself, especially on the subject of how to interpret dreams. In one example, Peregrino must defend himself at a trial for breaking and entering the house of Genevera’s neighbour,

Genius Loci

127

Leonora, and violating her. Peregrino, even in the face of physical evidence that places him at the scene of the crime – the clothing he abandons in his hurry to escape – maintains that Leonora dreamed the entire incident. With a nod to dream theorists from Artemidorus to Macrobius, Peregrino maintains that our dreams articulate what we fear and desire. Dreams, states Peregrino in chapter 54 of the first book, are thoughts and reasonings, and in that guise they appear as simulacra of those things that one wants to see.27 Many people, he says, have been fascinated and tricked by shades that only appear to have substance, but in reality do not: “Questa arte mercuriale per tal modo prestigia gli occhi nostri, che non permette lassarne vedere né discernere il vero dal falso” (128; This mercurial art deceives our eyes in such a way that it does not permit us to discern true from false.). Ultimately in the novel Peregrino’s legal defence succeeds; the monarch dismisses the case against him. By extension, this episode implicitly adds another layer of unreliability to both the dreams and the ghostly apparitions that make up the entire framing narrative of the work. This example is certainly not the only passage from the Peregrino that addresses the purpose and significance of dreams. In book 2, chapter 39, Peregrino’s beloved Genevera has three brief visions in a dream that all foretell sad events for her. She asserts that “magiore verità non è sotto il cielo di quella che per insogno è pronunciata, sì come di Ioseph la scriptura testificha” (222; there is no greater truth under the heavens than that which is revealed through dreams, as the Scriptures testify of Joseph). Peregrino manages to convince her that dreams may be the cause of baseless fears and may not be reliable. The entire following chapter consists of Peregrino’s detailed discussion of the circumstances that determine whether dreams are trustworthy or not. He argues out of self-interest that they are not. Another example comes in chapter 45 of book 2. Peregrino invokes aid after reading a disturbing letter from Genevera. The shade of Scipio comes to him, that same Scipio whose dream closes the final book of Cicero’s Republic.28 “Scipio” in Caviceo’s text identifies himself in a way that associates him with other famous exiles: “Io son quel Scipione che a la patria mia, doppo le innumere fatiche e raportati triumphi, per sua ingratitudine l’ossa negai” (232; I am that Scipio whose bones, after numerous trials and recognized triumphs, I denied to my country because of its ingratitude). The emphasis falls on the ungratefulness of fellow citizens for the successful campaigns on behalf of the city by one of its own defenders. The episode turns out to be an odd digression

128

Speaking Spirits

on civic ingratitude when, in fact, the premise was merely the ingratitude or unfaithful service of one of Genevera’s servants in the amorous designs of the couple. Even stranger, perhaps, is the way in which this indictment of civic ingratitude ends with the observation that Aeneas was a fine example illustrating that it is not always a greater virtue to remain in a place than to flee it when the circumstances dictate. On an autobiographical level, moreover, this argument may also serve as a kind of apology for Caviceo’s own frequent flights from various Italian courts. Finally, chapter 33 of book 3 opens with Peregrino wandering the city of Ravenna in search of his beloved, who at this point secretly resides in a convent. Walking through the streets sighing and weeping, Peregrino encounters “quello amplissimo veneto, che le cenere del poeta fiorentino, già gran tempo senza honore sepulchrale iacente, de pyramide marmorea exculta honorò … Bernardo Bembo” (285; that most generous Venetian who honoured the ashes of the Florentine poet, who had lain for a long time without sepulchral honours, Bernardo Bembo). In the end Peregrino does not speak to Bembo, and the encounter seems little more than illustrious name-dropping within the narration. Nonetheless, it is one more instance in the Peregrino in which Caviceo draws attention to a famous exile not properly honoured in his homeland. This is, however, not a matter of just any exile, but of Dante Alighieri, whose remains, as I traced in chapter 2, were a particularly sore point of contention between Ravenna and Florence during this period.29 Given Bernardo Bembo’s personal alliances of friendship with Florentines Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino, Landino, and others, and his sincere desire to honour the memory of Dante, he may very well have tried his best to induce the governments of Venice and Ravenna to repatriate Dante’s remains. As Nella Giannetto said, “Proprio Bernardo nel 1476 si adopera presso il governo della Serenissima perché induca i Ravennati a consegnare ai Fiorentini le ossa di Dante, ma i suoi sforzi, evidentemente, risultano vani” (Precisely Bernardo [Bembo] in 1476 does his best to get the Serenissima’s government to induce the people of Ravenna to hand over Dante’s bones to the Florentines, but all of his efforts were evidently in vain).30 Only then does Bembo take it upon himself to do what he can to honour Dante where he remains. Subsequently this action takes on sometimes veiled, civically partisan interpretations. During his period of service as vicedomino of Ferrara (1497–9), Bembo enjoyed the intellectually dynamic Estense court, which included the company of Ariosto, Strozzi, and Caviceo. As Giulio Bertoni says,

Genius Loci

129

“Ferrara rappresenta infatti per il Bembo la più grossa esperienza intellettuale dopo gli anni fiorentini … Non credo di esagerare dicendo che probabilmente è proprio questo soggiorno ferrarese del padre a decidere la carriera futura di Pietro e della sua scelta a favore del volgare” (In fact, Ferrara represents for Bembo the greatest intellectual experience after his Florentine years … I do not believe I exaggerate in saying that probably it is precisely this sojourn of his father in Ferrara that decides the future career of Pietro and his choice to favour the vernacular).31 Bertoni also emphasizes the splendour of the Ferrarese court in these years, attributing the credit to Lucretia Borgia’s patronage of the arts: “Non mai la corte estense aveva brillato di maggiore splendore”32 (The Este court had never shone with greater splendour). Of course, Pietro Bembo finished and dedicated Gli Asolani to Lucretia Borgia in 1504. Critics, including Achille Tartaro and Enrico Carrara, cite Caviceo’s work in the same breath as Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream, 1499), understood as the pioneering novel that inspired Caviceo.33 While it would be impossible to deny that there are some similarities – most notably the dream narrative mode and the non-Florentine vernacular language – the two projects diverge in important ways. For instance, the Poliphili’s more insistent allegory and its focus on esoteric mnemonic systems lend the text a cipher-like inaccessibility. The viator of the Poliphili is, as Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele assert: guidato dall’abiezione della feritas a una humanitas non meramente purgata, liberata dai sensi (come vuole il platonismo cristiano …), bensì come vitalizzata, fermentata dall’integrazione tra corpo e anima, tra sensi materiali e sensi spirituali, tra Venere Pandemia e Venere Urania appunto, coincidenti nell’Alma Venus, nella grande Madre Physizoa ai cui misteri verranno iniziati i due Amanti. guided by the abjection of feritas to a humanitas not merely purged and liberated of the senses (as Christian Platonism requires …), but rather as vitalized, fermented out of the integration of body and soul, of material and spiritual senses, of Pandemian Venus and Uranian Venus, coinciding in Alma Venus, in the great Mother Physizoa into whose mysteries the two Lovers will be initiated.34

Caviceo’s Peregrino, to put it more simply, celebrates not undergoing that same ennoblement of the soul. Peregrino and Genevera’s nuptials

130

Speaking Spirits

represent a carnal union, the fruit of which heralds their death. But the afterworld is a satisfactory place of eternal cultural reconciliation, or at the least, Caviceo’s wishful thinking of a levelling of the civic, intellectual playing field. As is probably already evident, Caviceo was not the only non-Florentine to remind the Florentines of their failure to honour “their” poets. Another example is Toldo Costantini (1576–c. 1651), a citizen of Serravalle (today known as Vittorio Veneto in the province of Treviso) by birth. He wrote in his poem titled Il Giudicio estremo (The Final Judgment) that he imagined a conversation with Dante’s spirit in which he pointedly asked Dante: “E perché da Ravenna e non piuttosto/ Da Fiorenza ten vien?” (And why do you come from Ravenna rather than/from Florence?). Costantini’s spirit of Dante responds by critiquing Florence as “la mia ingrata terra [che] mi fe’ ingiusta e pertinace Guerra” (my ungrateful homeland [that] waged against me a persistent and unjust War), while “Ravenna mi raccolse e con pietose/Nenie mi seppellì” (Ravenna welcomed me and buried me with pious lullabies).35 Dante also became a symbol and touchstone for other exiles, including the author of the “Sonetto all’imagine di Dante” (Sonnet on the Image of Dante). Although the identity of the exiled poet is not clear in this case, the poem expresses a common sentiment: “Eccome lasso, a te simil’ ancora/Nel cercar nova patria, e mutar stile … huom di virtù, poco alla patria è grato” (Here I am, alas, so similar to you/In seeking a new country, and changing my ways … a virtuous man is appreciated precious little by his own country).36 In sum, Florentine authors invoked the spirit of Dante in particular to associate him with the city of his birth, to apologize for earlier Florentine mistreatment, to argue implicitly for the return of his body to its rightful homeland, and to suggest an unbroken literary and cultural heritage in the shared Florentine fatherland. Non-Florentine authors, especially those like Caviceo in Ferrara who wrote in a language other than the Florentine vernacular and who foresaw a new direction of literary development, emphasized instead the mobility of authors who Florentines claimed were Florentine, and even fictively naturalized them as citizens of rival cultural courts. In the body of the romanzo, moreover, Caviceo succeeded in making sharp critiques of the kind of high-flung Florentine rhetoric concerning Dante’s body that characterized Florentine proems. Caviceo’s Peregrino appeared, in fact, only two years after Benivieni’s “Cantico.” It must be emphasized that in spite of its entertaining qualities and its status as fiction, Caviceo’s Peregrino was a

Genius Loci

131

text profoundly engaged in the political realities of its day. Renaissance writers invoked authorial ghosts not because they wished literally to raise or to bring back the dead, or merely to tell entertaining stories. Rather, by creating authoritative ghosts that speak for their Renaissance causes, the later writers claimed some degree of literary authority for themselves at the same time that they exercised control over who could speak for earlier authors. If for Florentines Dante’s case was one of the most famous failures of a Renaissance “ghost” to impose his will concerning his final resting place, the literary ploy was successful in at least one other case: the translation of Pico’s corpse, to which I now turn. In addition to his eidolopoeia of Dante in the “Cantico,” examined in chapter 2, Benivieni presented a seemingly more successful instance of eidolopoeia using Pico’s voice in two sonnets. Pico’s Spirit Uncharacteristically Petitions for a New Indoor Crypt After Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s mysterious and unexplained death in 1494 at the age of thirty-one, Benivieni was distraught to the point of withdrawing from others and foregoing further writing.37 In spite of their great differences, the two men were the closest of friends. Benivieni was ten years Pico’s senior, and the two men came from vastly different backgrounds. Pico enjoyed the wealth and privilege that his nobility provided, while Benivieni sprang from a middle-class Florentine family. Their temperaments also diverged. Pico, widely praised as a quintessential exemplar of masculine beauty, could be overconfident and even reckless, as evidenced by the dire consequences he endured after the Margherita de’ Medici abduction scandal, or from the condemnation of his Five Hundred Theses, largely seeking to reconcile pagan, Christian, and other belief systems.38 On the other hand, if lifelong bachelor Benivieni knew any love scandals, their memory has not passed down to us,39 and the erudition of the “Other Orpheus” of Lorenzo’s court was unfailingly tempered by Benivieni’s prudence and diplomacy. Still, Pico and Benivieni enjoyed a closeness – from the time they met, probably shortly after Pico’s arrival for the first time in Florence in 1479 – that went far beyond their poetic collaborations (most notably Pico’s commentary on a love canzone by Benivieni) and their shared spiritual conversions to Savonarola’s piagnone program. Such was the unusual state of trust between these two men that Benivieni

132

Speaking Spirits

represented Pico as his elemosiniere (one who distributes alms) among the poor who benefited greatly from Pico’s generosity.40 Pico’s death in 1494 came during uncertain and difficult times. The very day Pico died, King Charles VIII of France marched on Florence into the wake of the political vacuum created by political turmoil in the city and Piero de’ Medici’s precipitous flight out of the city. Savonarola’s political popularity was rising, and the piagnone religious frenzy urging the repentance of sin and the performance of public acts of contrition and self-abasement was waxing in the city, quickly transforming it from a “New Athens” into a “New Jerusalem.” In this spirit, Pico had by the end of his life resolved to go forth barefoot with a crucifix in his hands to evangelize the people (“s’era proposto di andare a piedi scalzi e col crocifisso in mano ad evangelizzare le genti”).41 Moreover, he made only two requests for his burial: “[egli non poneva che due condizioni,] fosse Cristiana, e si spendesse il meno possible” (that it be Christian and that it cost as little as possible).42 The count’s family, in spite of their nobility and wealth, seems to have assented to Pico’s burial requests. Pico was buried very modestly outside the walls of Florence’s Dominican Church of San Marco. According to biographer Caterina Re, “Il Pico dunque fu riposte a tutta prima fuori di Chiesa, in qual punto non possiamo dir di sicuro, ma probabilmente nel cimitero comune dei secolari, e nel fondo di esso come già il Poliziano” (Pico thus was buried as soon as possible outside of the church, in what precise place we cannot say with certainty, but probably in the common laypeople’s cemetery, and in the back of it, as Politian had been).43 Even years after Pico’s passing, Benivieni’s praise of his friend remained fresh and moving.44 Benivieni’s near-suicidal thoughts eventually moderated somewhat, however, and he outlived Pico by nearly a half-century – forty-eight years. Benivieni thus had ample occasion to experience a prolonged period of grief, the waning of piagnone enthusiasms, and perhaps a nagging sense of the incongruity between Pico’s merit and fame during his lifetime and the relative shabbiness and anonymity of his burial place. Benivieni likely feared that Pico’s excellent example would be forgotten, buried as his body was, outside the church where few people would see his resting place. So Benivieni purchased a tomb inside the walls of the church, intending it not merely for himself but to be shared with his dearest friend, according to Benivieni’s biographer, his grandnephew Antonio Benivieni the Younger (1533–1598).45 However, it was not enough for Girolamo Benivieni to buy the tomb; he also had to convince others to permit the translation of Pico’s bones.

Genius Loci

133

After all, Pico himself had shunned precisely this kind of exalted burial in his deathbed testament. Benivieni laboured on two fronts. At the age of seventy-nine, in 1532, he agreed to participate in the Florentine government as a member of the Duecento. His actions in this group were few, although, according to Cesare Vasoli (in his entry on Benivieni in the Dizionario biografico), Benivieni endeavoured to exert political influence to persuade the reluctant or perhaps indifferent Duke Alessandro de’ Medici to permit the translation of Pico’s body within the Church of San Marco. But Benivieni was nothing if not persistent. He employed another tactic, penning two sonnets in which a dead Pico himself is figured as speaking in the first person.46 In the first poem his spirit implores Bishop Agnolo Marzi to intercede on his behalf with Duke Alessandro de’ Medici to have his burial place moved: Se lauro, quel sotto i cui sacri rami Il primo nido mio già ’n terra posi S’e’ fructi che di lui sì gloriosi Usciti son, se me, se ’l tuo ben ami, Pietà ti stringa, onde tu cerchi e brami Che ’n più honesta sede io mi riposi Dove sia chi per me con più pietosi Affecti orando a Dio suplice exclami. Oh s’e’ tuoi occhi e quei del tuo Signore Vedessin come il sol, la pioggia, e’ venti Batton hor l’ossa mie nude e ’nsepolte Mosso a pieta de’ mie giusti lamenti In miglior loco e con maggior mio honore Sareben l’ossa mie subito accolte. If you love the laurel, that one under whose sacred branches Rested my first nest on earth, Or the glorious fruits that have come from him, If you love me or if you love your own good, May pity move you, to seek and desire That in a more honourable place you have me moved Where someone with more pitying affections for me can exclaim to God in prayer. Oh! if your eyes and those of your Lord Could see how the sun, rain, and winds Now batter my naked and unburied bones

134

Speaking Spirits

Then moved to pity by my just laments In a better place and with greater honour My bones would immediately be welcomed.47

It is, of course, Benivieni who wrote the sonnet, whose full title is “In Persona dello Ill. S. Conte Giovanni Pico Mirandula al R.do Mon.S. De Marzi B[enivenius] Pregalo che gli impetri gratia appresso della Ill.mo S. Duca Alexandro de’medici che le ossa sue sieno raccolte e poste in piú celebre luogo ch’elle non sono” (In the Person of the Illustrious Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to the Reverend Monsignor Marzi, Benivieni Begs Him to Supplicate the Favour from the Illustrious Duke Alessandro de’ Medici that His [Pico’s] Bones be Gathered and Moved to a More Celebrated Place than They Are Now).48 Moreover, Benivieni is the one who initiated the request to move Pico’s remains. But Benivieni’s petition appears to wield greater weight of authority by dint of the rhetorical ruse of shifting the voice so that it seems to come from Pico’s dead spirit. It is as if “Pico,” offended by the harsh weather, has changed his mind about his final resting place and now wishes to move inside to a more worthy and restful tomb. In making his request, Benivieni prudently passed over in silence Pico’s adherence to Savonarola’s program of radical religious reformation. He also did not mention the cause – if it is true – of Pico’s death by poisoning at the behest of a Medici family member who blamed governmental antagonisms on Pico, the one who originally insisted that Lorenzo de’ Medici (“the laurel” of the first verse) bring Savonarola from Ferrara to the city of Florence.49 Instead Benivieni emphasized the glories of Lorenzo’s circle, which lent greater prestige also to this later member of the Medici family. It is not clear if Alessandro was moved by Benivieni’s verses, since no response remains.50 Benivieni then composed a second sonnet. This time the composition contains language meant to bolster Benivieni’s confidence and to “second” his intent to translate Pico’s remains. In the second sonnet, Benivieni portrayed the dead Pico as exhorting Benivieni to persevere in his task:51 In quello immenso luminoso et vero Specchio del mondo ov’ogni ben resulta, Ov’ogni cosa incognita et occulta Si vede, ogni concepto, ogni pensiero,

Genius Loci

135

Vegg’io hor ben il tuo pio desidero Che quella veste ch’hor nuda e ’nsepulta Giace costì in più fertile e culta Terra transumpta sia com’io spero. Seguita, non temer, chè se dal seme Non degenera il fructo, il tuo disegno Defraudato non fia, nè la tua speme, Et io gratie immortali, sì come è degno A Lauro renderò, che meco insieme Fruisce i ben di questo eterno regno. In that immense, luminous, and true Mirror of the world, whence every good comes, Where everything unknown and hidden Is seen, every concept, every thought, I see well now your pious desire That the covering that now lies naked and in the grave Be exhumed, as I hope, to a more fertile and venerated land. Continue, do not fear that from the seed The fruit will degenerate – it cannot – Your plan will not be denied, nor your hope, And I will render unending thanks to the Laurel, As is right, who with me together Enjoys the goods of this eternal kingdom.

In this poem, as in Dante’s Paradiso, the blessed can see the thoughts of others in God as in a mirror. Benivieni links together Dante, Pico, and Lorenzo de’ Medici (“lauro,” “the Laurel”) in God’s paradise. Pico’s spirit portrays Benivieni’s wish to be buried together with him as a “pio desiderio” (pious desire), and the spirit hopes that they will repose in the “più fertile e cultivata” (more fertile and cultivated) sacred space of the church.52 In the end, Benivieni’s hope found satisfaction: the two friends were – and are – buried together in a stately tomb in San Marco, where a regular stream of faithful and tourists say prayers and render homage to the renowned pair from the Florentine circle. Beneath them reposes another shining star of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cultural firmament – Angelo Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1454–1494) – and their tomb is now adorned with an arresting nineteenth-century bronze sculpture

136

Speaking Spirits

of Savonarola. It bears noting, too, that Benivieni succeeded in his selfimposed task to translate Pico’s corpse in spite of other attempts to move the remains elsewhere. Benivieni faced some competition in the enterprise. Just as Florentines sought Dante’s remains from Ravenna, the citizens of Mirandola also sought repatriation from Florence of the bones of their most famous compatriot, and Montepulciano sought the remains of the other humanist, Angelo Poliziano, sharing the same space in San Marco.53 In their failure, the Mirandolans in Pico’s case, like the Florentines in Dante’s, also emphasized celebrating the famous citizen’s spirit and works, even suggesting that to do so might be superior to merely honouring the dead body. Honouring the dead appears from this perspective to be a positive, virtuous act. After all, Benivieni is Pico’s best friend and loves him greatly. People can also change their minds over time, and Benivieni seems to be assuming that Pico, had he lived, would have come to change his mind and share Benivieni’s perspective in the 1530s that the outdoor burial arrangement was no longer tenable. Is there, however, another way of looking at this situation? How sacred and how absolute are expressed final wishes before death? Does anybody ever have the right that Benivieni claims to revise Pico’s final wishes concerning his burial? After all, friends, even ones as close as these two men, can drift apart over so many decades or, even if they do not, they can simply disagree on any given issue. Seriously entertaining the possibility that dead spirits can change their minds would presumably lead to disturbing theological consequences, as well: A spirit of the dead is no more likely to be able to change its mind than the damned and the blessed are able to change places in the other world. Thus I must return to emphasize that – no matter how the author of eidolopoeia may represent a plea from the spirit as being for the spirit’s benefit – the narrative is written to benefit the author in some way(s). It is a commonplace to say today that funerals are for the living, not the dead; narratives featuring spirits are also for the living and not for the dead. Moreover, the benefit to the author – besides being potentially selfish, in addition to self-serving – has the potential to hold less-than-virtuous aims. One can just as easily imagine Pico’s spirit as nobly resolved to remain humbly buried outside the Church of San Marco and distressed or enraged by the location of his remains today. At what point do authors of eidolopoeia cross a line and transgress a sacred trust?54 Another lesson of these and many other eidolopoetic representations of this period is this: by speaking for the dead, writers open a door on

Genius Loci

137

a place that is a kind of limbo in which dead authors are never really “dead.” The dead do not possess identities (opinions, personal characteristics/virtues, etc.) over which they have any control. Subsequent writers can use the predecessors’ authority for personal purposes by reauthoring the works, deeds, and perspectives of the dead. Moreover, as in the last case, we see that Pico had no guarantee, in spite of his ratified will and testament, that his wishes would be respected. His closest friend was in fact the one to undo by means of poems the historical Pico’s deliberate plans for self-determination of his body after death. The full realization of the existential horror of this scenario will return in the final sections of the following chapter.

4 Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum: Some Not-So-Final Thoughts

Da poi che Morte triunfò nel volto che di me stesso triunfar solea, e fu del nostro mondo il suo sol tolto, partissi quella dispietata e rea, pallida in vista, orribile e superba che ’l lume di beltate spento avea: quando, mirando intorno su per l’erba, vidi da l’altra parte giugner quella che trae l’uom del sepolcro e ’n vita il serba. When death had triumphed in the countenance That had so often triumphed over me, And when the sun was taken from our world, That pitiless and evil one had gone, Pallid in aspect, horrible, and proud, By whom the light of beauty had been quenched, Then, as I gazed across the grassy vale I saw appearing on the other side Her who saves man from the tomb, and gives him life. – Petrarch, Triumphus Fame, I.1–91 … Ma per la turba a’ grandi errori avezza dopo la lunga età sia ’l nome chiaro: che è questo però che sì s’apprezza? Tutto vince e ritoglie il Tempo avaro; chiamasi Fama, et è morir secondo; né più che contra ’l primo è alcun riparo. Così ’l Tempo triunfa i nomi e ’l mondo.

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

139

… And even though the errant crowd may hold That for long ages Fame may still endure, What is it that so highly is esteemed? Time in his avarice steals so much away: Men call it Fame; ’tis but a second death, And both alike are strong beyond defense. Thus doth Time triumph over the world and Fame. – Petrarch, Triumphus Temporis, 139–45

In previous chapters I examined an array of early Italian authorial eidolopoeia in which fictive narratives of the speaking dead have raised intriguing literary issues and at times disturbing ethical dilemmas that have also on occasion effected real change in legal or political spheres. Eidolopoeia underscores the importance of the spirit character as both historical and dead. Iconic figures possess historical status and authority. Their biographies can inspire readers by their actual words and actions. Even if Renaissance writers subsequently embellish or change aspects of the protagonists’ lives or beliefs when representing them as spirits, some part of their recognized or remembered historicity still carries a weight of credibility or authority. In addition, a storyteller, such as Machiavelli, may want his audience to feel a collective civic guilt at the earlier treatment of his interlocutor because events in the storyteller’s life (Machiavelli’s) may resemble the exile and persecution in his idol’s (Dante’s). It would not be possible to call to mind this sense of guilt in the same immediate way with a purely fictitious character. Moreover, it is profoundly significant that authors portray their respected predecessors as dead spirits. In doing so, the Renaissance storytellers effectively add another dimension of authority to their characters. The dead spirit by definition is assumed to possess knowledge through experience that no living human being possibly could – the knowledge of both life and death. However, it is the storyteller, in an intermediary role similar to that of a medium, who commands that knowledge. The storyteller’s invention of the spirit character is a rhetorical form of one-upmanship: the storyteller claims to see something that the audience cannot, making the writer’s role distinctively privileged. The storyteller frames and presents a typically far-fetched narrative that cannot be verified in any way, yet must be accepted on its own terms. When the storyteller is also an editor or translator endeavouring to impart authority on his own version of a text – as in the case of Girolamo Malipiero in Il Petrarcha spirituale, who conjures Petrarch’s

140

Speaking Spirits

spirit so that “Petrarch himself” can give his stamp of approval to Malipiero’s awkward moralizations of the Canzoniere – then the authority ploy is also unavoidably circular. Early modern Italian writers also play very effectively on the concept of corpus to be both a corpse and a body of work. Writers of eidolopoeia sometimes conflate these two understandings of corpus in pursuit of scholarship. Instead of teasing out the message of a text, they might conjure the spirit of the author to speak that message, but without acknowledging the potential pitfalls of that communication. There is no consideration of the licence of the author to create a dead spirit as potentially ignorant, lying, or otherwise untrustworthy, for instance. In other words, the eidolopoeia author’s interpretation or representation of the dead spirit typically risks becoming another layer of unreliable text. Antonio Manetti’s interpretation of Guido Cavalcanti’s legacy is an exception and a crucial lesson in this regard. Manetti does not assume that because he “sees” Cavalcanti’s figure (the body corpus), he will necessarily be enlightened concerning Cavalcanti’s textual corpus. In a move that is unusual for the time, but not for this rigorous humanist, Manetti distrusts the ephemeral quality of the ghostly visit. Cavalcanti’s works could instead impart reliable information, something concretely verifiable by anyone else. Manetti’s character in the Notizia poses unverifiable questions to the fictive spirit of Cavalcanti and receives exactly what he expects to receive, that is, no satisfaction. Manetti’s lesson to his readers is that only by reading and studying Cavalcanti’s primary texts and the good secondary sources that are cited in the narrative can one come to a reliable knowledge of Cavalcanti’s corpus. Manetti may be hindered by his own scepticism in this case, but if verifiable scholarship is his aim, he too (along with every other conjurer of a dead idol) receives precisely what he seeks – in Manetti’s case, only as much as it may be possible to know from other sources. Reinventing the character of a person who is already dead can be a great advantage when the storyteller’s message is particularly controversial or unpopular. In his “Cantico in laude di Dante,” Girolamo Benivieni presents a spirit of Dante with distinctly piagnone or pro-Savonarolan sympathies, a political and spiritual attitude that only came into being in the 1490s. Benivieni’s work appeared only eight years after the zealous Dominican friar was burned at the stake in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1498 on charges of grave suspicion of heresy, sedition, uttering false prophecies, and other serious matters. Some of Benivieni’s contemporaries endured harsh persecutions for their piagnone views, a

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

141

fate that Benivieni mostly avoided at least in part, I believe, because he articulated his views in poetic and thus potentially ambiguous ways, as well as by means of eidolopoeia: ventriloquizing those views through the spirit of Dante. Choosing a dead protagonist also permitted Benivieni to avoid damaging any reputations of living contemporaries or his relationships with them, as might have happened, for instance, if he had chosen to write his work in another very popular form around this time: as a dialogue with living interlocutors (e.g., Baldassar Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano, begun in 1508). Articulating a controversial message through a dead spirit was effective, since the messenger (the ghost or spirit of the dead) could not be killed or complain, as a living interlocutor in a dialogue might. But like dialogues, eidolopoetic narratives remain open-ended. Significantly, the spirit character is never definitively “dead” and can always be made to reappear.2 In fact, ghost stories and eidolopoeia more broadly establish an eternally destabilized situation in which death is not the end, nor can it settle definitively any controversies. Those narratives bring up points for debate and rely on the shifting of perspective to insinuate doubts about the “reality” even of situations of fact (e.g., will Dante’s body always rest in peace in Ravenna?). Even if it is mere fiction, however, a spirit’s voice can seem particularly imperious, almost like a divine proclamation, a message that comes from beyond the grave that one dare not contradict. Italian Renaissance eidolopoetic examples have been especially concerned with imparting knowledge, determining the “correct” versions of texts or translations, and clarifying truths concerning the afterworld, for instance. But whose truths? And correct versions of works or of the otherworld, according to whom? How important the eidolopoeia writer’s perspective really is might best be illustrated through the examination from three different authorial perspectives of the same fantasy: to know while still alive what happens to the animate part (the anima, soul) of the human being after bodily death. Rather than a conclusion, I offer in this space a broadening of considerations to non-authorial eidolopoeia and to some of the potential consequences of the self after death. Vows between Friends to Return from the Other World with the Truth of What Happens after Death Boccaccio has presented the best-known version of the narrative in which two friends make a pact that whoever dies first will return in spirit to impart true knowledge of the other world to the survivor. The

142

Speaking Spirits

tenth novella of the seventh day in the Decameron recounts the case of two Sienese friends, Tingoccio and Meuccio.3 Both have fallen in love with a woman named Mita, who is Tingoccio’s comare, that is, godmother or, in this case, the mother of Tingoccio’s godson. Tingoccio eventually succeeds in having sex with Mita, an act that violates a particular bond of religious kinship, and he dies shortly thereafter. Three nights after his death, he keeps his promise and appears to Meuccio, rousing him from sleep. Alarmed, Meuccio cries, “Qual se’ tu?” (879; “Who [or what] are you?” 469).4 After Meuccio ascertains that the figure before him is indeed the ghost of his dead friend, he asks if Tingoccio now counts himself among the damned. Tingoccio says, “Cosetto no, ma io son bene, per li peccati da me commessi, in gravissime pene e angosciose molto” (880; “I wouldn’t put it that way, though I’m getting a fair old grilling for my sins, that’s for sure,” 469). Meuccio learns from Tingoccio how sins are punished in the afterworld and agrees to have masses and prayers said and alms given on his dead friend’s behalf. As Tingoccio is leaving, Meuccio asks one final question: “della comare con la quale tu giacevi quando eri di qua, che pena t’è di là data?” (880, “that woman you were sleeping with, the mother of your godson – what’s your punishment for that?” 469). In response, Tingoccio describes how, when he first reached the otherworld, he was trembling like a leaf in a scorching fire, fearing some greater punishment because of the religious bond he had violated in his erotic congress with Mita. He confessed his fear to a fellow sufferer in the otherworld: “io ho gran paura del giudicio che io aspetto d’un gran peccato che io feci già … Il peccato fu cotale, che io mi giaceva con una mia comare, e giacquivi tanto, che io me ne scorticai” (881; “I’m dead scared of the judgment I’m expecting for a terrible sin I committed … It was a bad, bad one: I was sleeping with my godson’s mother. I ploughed her up so well I ploughed myself into the ground,” 470). But the other spirit merely elbowed Tingoccio and replied, “Va, sciocco, non dubitare, ché di qua non si tiene ragione alcuna delle comari!” (881; “Get along with you, you ninny! Don’t worry: godparents count for less than nothing round here!” 470). With that, Tingoccio’s ghost bids Meuccio goodbye, and Meuccio, perhaps not too prudently, goes on to seduce his own godson’s mother, or so the text seems to imply. Boccaccio’s story is told by the most subversive of the ten young narrators of the Decameron, Dioneo. Moreover, all of the hundred tales are told for pleasurable entertainment as a diversion from the ravages of death and societal norms bought about by the bubonic plague of 1348. The comic relief of this novella is highlighted because the storyteller

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

143

inverts listener (or reader) expectations. Instead of emphasizing eternal punishment for breaching a sacred trust based on the godfamily relationship, Tingoccio’s message serves to encourage the friend to behave in the same “incestuous” way (rather than seducing the original object of his affections, Mita, who was of no godfamilial relation to Meuccio), and portrays both men as too dull-witted to avoid infernal punishment, perhaps even too dull-witted to recognize it as such. Another tale with a very similar plot was told by Ludovico Domenichi (1515–1564), who compiled this and many other stories and anecdotes in his Historia di detti, e fatti degni di memoria di diversi principi e huomini private antichi et moderni (Account of the Sayings and Facts Worthy of Memory by Various Princes and Private Men Both Ancient and Modern). It is a brief tale in which the spirit of the notorious Pope Benedict IX appears to a certain unnamed friend of his. When this friend inquires why the dead pope’s appearance is so frightfully ugly, Benedict replies: “perche nella vita mia vissi senza legge, & senza ragione, per ciò volendo cosi Dio, & San Pietro, la cui sedia io lordai con tutti i vittuperi del mondo, la mia sembianza ha molto piu della bestia, che dell’huomo”5 (Because during my life I lived lawlessly and without reason, God and St Peter, whose seat I besmirched with all the vituperations of the world, have willed that my appearance seem more bestial than human).6 Domenichi adds that the friend, who had encouraged and shared to some extent in Benedict’s sinful past, mended his ways and tried to live a more virtuous Christian life from that day forward. History records that Pope Benedict IX was born circa 1012 in Rome with the name Theophylactus. He had the distinction of being the only successor of Peter to sell the papacy. He served as pontiff for three discontinuous periods from 1032 to 1044, briefly in 1045, and again in 1047–8;7 his contemporaries accused him of simony, sodomy, and a host of other mortal and venial sins. The moral of Domenichi’s story is clearly implied: there is no escape from death for any mortal – no matter the status or position attained – and punishment befitting one’s sins awaits the evildoer in the other world. The resolution is not comic, as Boccaccio’s tale was, but rather more closely parallels conventional medieval exempla of the type employed by preachers to illustrate the lessons of their sermons.8 This outcome is in line with Domenichi’s intent to collect and present in his Historia a wide-ranging collection of facts, sayings, and in this case curiosities concerning famous men. The third example with a near-identical plotline appears in the Treatise on Vampires and Revenants by Dom Antoine Augustine Calmet

144

Speaking Spirits

(1672–1757). While it is not an Italian example, and a significantly later one at that, I include it for its focus on Italian Renaissance characters. In this version of the tale, Marsilio Ficino and his friend Michael Mercati (“notary of the Holy See, a man of acknowledged probity and well informed, particularly in the Platonic philosophy, to which he applied himself unweariedly with Marsilius Ficin [Marsilio Ficino]”)9 make the pact that whoever dies first will return to the survivor in spirit to disclose the secrets of the other world. This narrative, according to Calmet, was related to him by “a very grave and respectable man” identified as Cardinal Baronius. The two Italian philosophers make their pact one day while “conversing on the immortality of the soul.” Time passes and Ficino dies. On the morning of Ficino’s death, Mercati is studying “the same philosophical matters” when he hears a horseman approach and a shout from outside, “Michael, Michael, nothing is more true than what is said of the other life.” Mercati rushes to his open window and pleads with the horseman to stop, but the spirit of Ficino gallops away. The moral in this version is a bit more ambiguous than it is in the previous two examples, since its interpretation may depend on whether the reader sees Platonic philosophical meanings, a strictly Christian message, or some kind of syncretistic blending of the two. Given Calmet’s postscript – “Michael Mercati, although very regular in his conduct before then, became quite an altered man, and lived in so exemplary a manner, that he became a perfect model of Christian life” – it is clear that the cleric interprets the spirit of Ficino’s message as an endorsement of a Christian otherworld with rewards for the virtuous (and by implication, punishments for the impenitent sinners). There is actually nothing in the spirit’s words to suggest, however, that Ficino confirms anything other than the truth of what the two Platonic philosophers have discussed during life. In other words, at the level of the narrative, the message suggests that Mercati’s and Ficino’s ideas about Platonism (or a syncretic religio-philosophical approach) are correct, but perhaps at the narrative level of Cardinal Baronius, and certainly by that of Dom Calmet, the same spirit is appropriated to confirm the ethical teachings of the Catholic Church. The juxtaposition of these three tales with similar plots brings into focus the perspective or ideology of the writer who employs spirit protagonists. The same narrative ploy and plot can promote a sinful carpe diem mindset, a pious conversion plea, or a recasting of a mysterious ambiguity over the life-and-death material that it treats. Moreover, the focus on the author’s perspective and intent helps me to address how inherently idiosyncratic

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

145

the eidolopoetic message is. When eidolopoeia is modelled on texts with carefully authenticated spiritual or religious tradition, such as hagiographies, then the message can seem to carry greater authority as well. Recounting lives of the saints typically aims to encourage admiration and veneration of exemplary Christians, while reinforcing readers’ faith, virtue, or moral fortitude. Sometimes eidolopoetic authors articulate secular, ideological, or political messages, but they use as their mouthpieces saintly spirits to lend a particular authority to those messages. The Vision of St Thomas Aquinas by Antonio da Rieti It is common in hagiographies for mortals to attest to seeing a holy dead person in a vision. This figure, oftentimes a patron saint or one favoured by the faithful percipient with frequent prayers, typically appears in order to offer spiritual strength, to heal the sick, to answer prayers and petitions, to confirm the Catholic faith (particularly in light of later Lutheran and other reformational challenges), or otherwise to offer evidence of the mercy and glory of God. Some visions, while featuring recognized saints, nonetheless appear to have somewhat more secular aims, frequently couched as prophecy.10 One example is the vision of St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) by Franciscan friar Antonio da Rieti (fifteenth century, but precise dates unknown), which is from a manuscript version dated 3 November 1442 contained in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence.11 Having returned to Venice from Jerusalem in 1422, Antonio da Rieti dreams that he experiences a heavenly vision – bright light, pleasant smells, and sweet singing of “Glory to God in the Highest.” A Dominican friar appears to him and tells him to reveal to others in their Mendicant orders what he is about to prophesy. In apocalyptic language and symbolism, the Dominican – who later identifies himself as Thomas Aquinas – predicts a series of political developments: the diffusion across the Mediterranean of Turkish influences and an attack on an Italian city by a member of the House of Aragon, and actions that would subsequently bring suffering to Florence. The saint also obliquely forecasts other events, including an incursion on Rome by Milanese forces. Waking from the dream, Antonio dismisses it as a product of exhaustion from his trip from the Holy Land. But three nights later, the saint returns in another dream to rebuke Antonio for not making known his prophecy. This time Antonio recounts his dream to two friars who are with him, in addition to his addressee, a Reverend Father Roberto.

146

Speaking Spirits

The main point in Antonio’s vision is that Florence will emerge as a centre of leadership in religious matters, and the city will become a refuge from heresy and Roman corruption. It was a message that Florentines evidently liked to repeat, since many fifteenth-century Florentine manuscripts contain prophetic visions quite similar to it.12 While it features a saint, this vision hardly conforms to the purposes of typical hagiographies. The figure of Aquinas surely serves to lend authority, righteousness, and believability to the Florentine prophecy, but the vision is not so much religious in nature as it is political, concerned far more with worldly power relations than one might anticipate from a vision of the saintly Catholic doctor and theologian. The figure of Aquinas, who in Dante’s sphere of the Sun (in Paradiso 10–12) introduces the harmony of religious orders and perspectives, serves here to bring Franciscans and Dominicans together in praise of Florence in the city’s religious struggles against Rome. That Florence continued to exert much influence in religious matters at this time might be due at least in part to repeated Florentine articulation of similar “prophecies” placed in the mouths of authoritative figures.13 In this regard, these visions are similar to ones that Florentines proffered featuring the spirit of Dante insisting on his Florentine citizenship and seeking to return to the city of his birth. It is also possible that, by claiming an ability to see and converse with the souls of the blessed departed, the authors of these visions likewise intend to increase their estimation in the minds of their audience, the members of their faith community. With these considerations in mind, I would like to turn to a very different kind of eidolopoetic text that is almost exactly contemporaneous with Antonio da Rieti’s vision, but penned by a Florentine merchant, Giovanni Morelli. This passage from Morelli’s Ricordi has already received a number of scholarly examinations, but none, as yet, have emphasized the rhetorically manipulative and coercive nature of the author’s message. Giovanni Morelli’s Account of His Dead Son’s Spirit Giovanni Morelli could surely be considered a success in terms of his mercantile profession. Conscientious and skilled, he became quite comfortably well-to-do, but in other areas of his long life, which ended in 1444 when he was seventy-two, he knew his share of tragedies and hardships. We know of them, as well, thanks to the diary that he began when he was twenty-two years old (sometimes referred to as the Ricordi, other

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

147

times as the Cronaca di Giovanni di Paolo [or Pagolo] Morelli).14 In this book, he detailed his difficult childhood. His father, whom he did not remember, died when Morelli was three years old, and his mother abandoned him to other relatives when she remarried the following year. He endured the subsequent deaths of his grandfather and older sister. In his youth, he fell desperately in love with a woman who spurned him. He subsequently married another woman, and noted the births of their four children. Morelli reserved the greatest share of his affection to his first-born son, Alberto, a waifish and somewhat sickly boy, who nevertheless proved to be a quick student of ancient languages, as well as of mercantile expertise. Morelli decided to write his Ricordi as a kind of handbook of advice for this beloved son in the event that Morelli should die unexpectedly, as his own father had done.15 Thus he wrote about the importance of staying abreast of civic political affairs and maintaining good relationships with the men in power, as well as about the need to use money to one’s best advantage and to seek advice from “uno o più valente uomo, savio e antico e sanza vizio” (205; one or more worthy men of the greatest wisdom and experience, who are without vices), and other advice of this kind. Unfortunately, what started out as a nosebleed eventually led to Alberto’s untimely death at nine years of age. Compounding Morelli’s crushing paternal grief was his overpowering sense of guilt for not showing the boy more frequently how much he loved him, and for not making sure that Alberto received last rites before he died. Richard Trexler notes that at the time it would have been unusual for children so young to make confession, an integral component of the sacrament of viaticum.16 Morelli’s conscience was particularly heavy, since he feared that Alberto would not be accepted into heaven for no fault of his own, but rather due to his father’s negligence in calling a priest to administer extreme unction to the dying boy. Morelli lived in constant torment with his thoughts, deprived of sleep and feeling as if the dead boy held a knife that pierced his heart (“e’ ci tiene un coltello che ci passa il cuore,” 295). Morelli marked the first anniversary of Alberto’s death with a long, elaborate, and highly personal series of prayers and devotions.17 Dressed only in a shirt, Morelli prayed fervently before the image of Christ’s crucifixion (which his dying son had repeatedly kissed in devotion). The more he prayed, the more comforted he felt, hoping that, if he could not have his son living with him again on earth, at least he

148

Speaking Spirits

might know that his son was enjoying blessedness in his eternal life. Morelli felt great sympathy with the Virgin Mary, figured in the crucifixion image he contemplated, since she, too, had lost a beloved son. When he had finished his orations to Mary and other saints, he got into bed and made the sign of the cross. Immediately, however, he said that his enemy, Satan, assailed him, insisting that the soul is nothing but a bit of breath, which is able to feel neither good nor evil (“l’anima fusse niente o un poco di fiato, che bene né male potea sentire,” 311). Satan insinuates in Morelli’s mind the impetus to despair, suggesting that Alberto’s fate will match all the other sorrows and disgraces of Giovanni Morelli’s life, and listing them in detail, from the deaths in his family to the abandonment by his mother, from the sicknesses he faced to the ill treatment he had at the hands of severe schoolmasters. Satan upbraids Giovanni, accusing him of not treating Alberto like his own son, but rather like a complete stranger (“tu nollo trattavi come figliuolo ma come istrano”), and continues: “tu non volesti mai dalgli un’ora di riposo; tu non gli mostrasti mai un buon viso; tu nollo baciasti mai una volta che buon gli paresse; tu l’amacerasti alla bottega e colle molte ispesse e aspre battiture” (315–16; You never conceded him an hour of rest; you never showed him a happy face; you never once kissed him when it might have done him good; you worked him to the bone in your shop, giving him regular and bitter blows). As if this were not enough, Giovanni hears Satan remind him of what torments him most: that Giovanni is responsible for Alberto not being at peace with God: Tu lo vedesti morire negli scuri, aspri e crudeli tormenti, e mai gli vedesti avere requia un’ora di sedici dì gli durò la ’nfermità. Tu l’hai perduto, e mai al mondo più il rivedrai: e per memoria di quello tu istarai sempre in paura e ’n tormento degli altri! (315–16) You saw him die in dark, harsh, and cruel torments, and you never gave him an hour’s peace in the sixteen days that his sickness lasted. You lost him, and you will never see him again in this world. And from the memory of what you did, you will forevermore be in fear and tormented by others!

Waking from this dream, Giovanni Morelli verges on utter despair, but instead he gazes again at the crucifix, putting his soul in God’s hands, and he falls asleep. About an hour later, he notes that he had a vision in his sleep that he believed was inspired by God (318). In this

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

149

vision, Giovanni tries to flee from the recurrent thoughts of his dead son by walking toward Mount Morello. As he walks, he remembers more details of his son, including his first movements in his mother’s womb. He filled various pages of his Ricordi with details of his dream, which include specific trees, a marvellous white bird with a golden beak and green legs, and some pigs and a sow, as well as a blindingly bright light from which his favourite saint, Catherine of Alexandria, emerges. Morelli would present any dream interpreter with an intriguing case. Ultimately, St Catherine touches the white bird and it becomes “ispirito come un angelo bianco” (322; a spirit like a white angel). When Morelli is able to focus more carefully on the figure, he recognizes his son Alberto. “Figliuolo mio! Alberto mio!” (322; My son! My Alberto!), he shouts, running to embrace him. But though he moves forward various times, “non mi parea appresarmegli punto” (322; it didn’t seem to me that I came any closer to [Alberto] at all). With St Catherine’s approval, Alberto’s spirit speaks to Morelli in his dream: Padre, prendete conforto, ché i vostri prieghi hanno passati i cieli e venuti accetti dinanzi al cospetto del nostro Signore Idío; e per segno di ciò mi vedete qui a consolazione di voi. Datevi pace e sperate nella divina provvidenzia, ed esso benigno Signore vi darà consolazione delle giuste e oneste vostre domande. (322) Father, take comfort, for your prayers have been heard and accepted in heaven in the presence of our Lord God. As a sign of this, you see me here for your consolation. Be at peace, and have hope in divine providence, and that good Lord will grant you consolation for your just and honest petitions.

Morelli writes that, after giving thanks to God, St Catherine, and the Virgin Mary, he practically overwhelms his son’s spirit with a series of questions, which clearly indicate his pre-eminent preoccupations, all of which seem rather self-centred: (1) if his own sins were the cause of Alberto’s death; (2) if the children left to him would satisfy him or if he would have others; (3) if God would grant him wealth and status in the Commune of Florence; and (4) how long he would live. Alberto’s spirit smiles, stating: “Padre del mio corpo, voi domandate assai cose, e Idio umile e grazioso vi darà in parte contentamento al vostro conosciere” (323; Father of my body, you ask quite a number of

150

Speaking Spirits

things, but God, humble and gracious, will satisfy in part your desire to know). Alberto continues by clarifying that God called him to Himself for the good of his father’s soul and his family “because of our sin” (“per lo nostro peccato,” 323), and that he would do well to hold his other children dear. The spirit also tells Morelli that he has had many graces from God already, and will have still more if he recognizes that they come from Him. He also expects that Morelli will die an old man. The spirit of Alberto takes his leave, and Morelli awakes “tutto ispaventato e ’n parte allegro” (324; all scared but partly happy). Morelli’s narrative is relatively idiosyncratic when compared to the many other instances of eidolopoeia in this study because of its profoundly personal concerns. Unlike the majority of the other stories in this study, Morelli’s narrative did not target a public audience, nor was its message intended to influence public or political action or widespread societal beliefs or behaviours. According to Trexler, “There is little doubt that Morelli, like more illustrious men, was himself recording all these prayers and inflections as exemplary procedures that had worked. Why else did he carefully transcribe each prayer and movement, if not to pass on to his descendants this successful experience?”18 Why indeed? Perhaps Morelli wanted to give his readers this impression, and yet, something tells me that his innermost ambition did not concern whether or not his surviving children grew up to practise his personalized form of penance. Certainly on the narratological level of Giovanni the character, it is easy to sympathize with him in his lifelong struggle against abandonment and grief.19 I do not dispute that what Trexler writes is absolutely true: “Giovanni did for his sons what his father had not done for him – reconstruct a love he had never known.”20 In the end, poor Giovanni sought comfort and some knowledge of whether or not all this suffering was worthwhile. But what is happening on the level of Giovanni the author? At this level, Giovanni transcribed a dream or invented a story to write down. Why? In order for his Ricordi not to be superfluous, but to have some purpose after Alberto’s death, he must recast what had been a text specifically intended for Alberto into a gift for his surviving children. Perhaps the writer became attached to his project and could not bear to stop writing; perhaps he could not fathom writing merely for himself (as in a personal diary) and needed to believe that he was doing something useful by offering advice to his remaining offspring. In any event, the continuation of the Ricordi may have had a complicated intent: both to excuse his own behaviour (and thereby

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

151

perhaps change the opinion that his readers have of him) and to effect a change in the character or behaviour of the readers themselves, his figli cadetti. As a father figure (quite literally), writing a story in which one’s authority is further reinforced by the appearance of a saint (Catherine of Alexandria) and a comforting message related through communication with his dead son, it may not be a stretch to suggest that Giovanni Morelli intended to reinvent his paternal image. In other words, Morelli’s purpose for presenting an example of eidolopoeia to his surviving children may have been to substitute a nicer image of his paternal behaviour or to attempt to supersede his actual fatherly image (perhaps not a particularly good one, given his self-confessed strictness and lack of affectionate displays, even to his favourite first-born son). By means of the Ricordi, Morelli could present a much different self-portrait: one of a man contrite, long-suffering, loving, concerned about the welfare of his offspring and now “rewarded” by the divine power of his angel-like son Alberto with whom he alone now has the privilege of discoursing. Even writers without public literary pretensions have motivations for their stories, and sometimes, as in this case, they can be more disturbing than they appear at first glance, particularly to the intended reader. Place yourself, for argument’s sake, in the role of Antoniotto, the second-born son, presented with the gift of this book in which your mean, self-absorbed, never-satisfied, emotionally stingy merchant father is the hero in a divinely sanctioned narrative, and the message you are supposed to learn seems to be: live up to your angel brother’s limitless potential and virtue. This invented version of Giovanni Morelli might have presented an instructive, though perhaps unintentional, lesson for the young readers on becoming keen interpreters of underlying intentions and motivations. After all, they received explicit instruction from their father within the narrative that “a Firenze ha gente viziata, e con cattività e vizi rapportano male e sottraggonti per nuove vi’ e tranelli” (202; there are sinners in Florence who with vicious intentions relate evil gossip, and they cheat you with new ways and tricks), and the children may have been able to apply such scepticism and interpretive techniques to come to a greater understanding of their father’s possible authorial traps. In this case, it is not particularly easy to determine if Morelli’s invented eidolopoetic vision is not a form of male [rapportato]. At the heart of Giovanni’s guilt is the self-accusation placed in the mouth of the character of Satan that the father did not treat Alberto as a son, but rather as an outsider.

152

Speaking Spirits

In this admission, addressed to his younger sons ostensibly in order to give them practical instruction in navigating their way in highly politicized Florentine society, the father essentially comes face to face with his guilt, prompted by treating his son as a political instrument of his own wealth and security. However, he does not fully or openly acknowledge this disturbing motivation. Without Alberto, Giovanni instead multiplies his efforts through this writing to ensure that his remaining sons will be useful to him. Giovanni the author dated the final entry of his Ricordi in 1421, fifteen years after Alberto’s death and fourteen years after the elaborate vision of Alberto’s spirit. He noted that his second-born son, Antoniotto, became ill with tertian fever near the town of Laiatico outside of Florence: “Non volle Idio v’andassi, o la mia nigrigenzia, per più mio dolore” (338; God did not want me to go to him there [to Laiatico], or perhaps it was due to my own negligence, which only adds to my suffering). However, this time the father made sure to reach his son before he died – in Empoli, on the way back to Florence. This time he gave his son his blessing and provided for his confession and final rites (“ivi il vidi: conobbemi e benedissilo; e da ch’io giunsi vivette circa a 3 ore e passò con buono conoscimento, confesso, comunicato e innoliato,” 338–9). He concluded his Ricordi with a prayer: “Cristo abbi l’anima e me faccia degno non vedere la morte degli altri, prestando loro vita lunga e buona, con figliuoli maschi e femmine buoni cristiani. E così piaccia a Dio donatore d’ogni bene e d’ogni grazia. Amen” (339; Christ take his soul to heaven and make me worthy not to see the death of my other children. Give them a long, good life with male and female children, good Christians. May this please God who is the giver of every good and every grace. Amen.) Although Giovanni lived another twenty-three years, curiously enough his Ricordi end here. It is as if the death of his second son with all of the proper rites could bring to an end his task of writing. He may have come to believe that he had finally exculpated himself in doing properly the second time what he did not manage to do at the death of his first son. Alternatively, his other children might have been old enough at this point that continuing his advice book would be unnecessary (one reason Giovanni gave near the beginning of the Ricordi for writing it was that his sons would have good advice from their father in the event that their father should die young, as his own father had). Yet another possibility is that he recognized that his intended readers were no longer quite as young and impressionable and would not necessarily

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

153

accept any more fictional recastings of his character from him. In any case, this text – so very intimate – might be terrifying to the reader not on the level of the narrative (Alberto’s ghost, for all its otherworldliness, does not set anyone’s teeth on edge), but on the level of authorial motive. My reading of Morelli’s vision thus differs greatly from the reaction of Jean-Claude Schmitt, who largely seconds Trexler’s emotional response: “Such a document gives the strongest impression of veracity. The modern reader feels sympathetic, in the primary sense of that term, toward Giovanni, the tormented father whose trial seems so credible, so believable, to us. The authenticity of the feelings expressed is undeniable.” He adds: This extraordinary tales shows [sic] perfectly how a cultivated layman at the end of the Middle Ages was able to confide to the intimacy of his record book the painful and anguishing experience of his mourning and the precise analysis of his own dreams. The entire Christian afterlife is present in this long tale: God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints to whom Giovanni vows a particular devotion. On the other side, incarnating his bad conscience, are the face and the voice of Satan. Between the two is the dead child, whose memory, day and night, haunts the father, who accuses himself of not having loved his son enough and of having perhaps compromised his son’s salvation. This man was not fundamentally different from us, and we can well understand his unhappiness and the images that haunted him. Thanks to him, we can grasp what ghosts truly were: they existed only through the strength of the imagination of the living, of the relatives who could not accept the unexpected and premature death of a child or someone else dear to them; they felt guilty for an unfortunate destiny or for the lack of concern they showed while there was still time to do so. The father saw the son as if he were alive; Giovanni wanted to take his son in his arms but understood that the distance between them was uncrossable, for the ghost was only an image in a dream. At the end of a year, to the day, the child was saved, the “labor of mourning” was finally completed thanks to the internalization of a temporal rhythm that had long been part of the liturgy of the dead, the anniversary marked the end of the obsessive return of the deceased, signifying his separation from those close to him, the liberation of the living.21

On the contrary, I believe that Morelli’s narrative shares a powercentred deceit with other more public instances of eidolopoeia.

154

Speaking Spirits

Another tale may illustrate by contrast just how manipulative Morelli’s Ricordi might be. Boccaccio’s fourteenth eclogue, composed in Latin, presents a pastoral vision of comfort to a bereaved father who likewise must face life after burying a child. Boccaccio casts himself recognizably in the role of Silvius, shepherd and forester in “a world where Christ is Roman.”22 Violante, Boccaccio’s real-life daughter, died at five years of age; in the poem she is figured with the name of Olympia and leaves her heavenly realm to appear to Silvius. Olympia describes a joyous other world and leaves Silvius yearning to know what he can do to be worthy of joining her there after his death. She urges him to accomplish acts of Christian charity, barely disguised in pastoral terms: Pasce famem fratris, lactis da pocula fessis, assis detentis et nudos contege, lapsos erige, dum possis, pateatque forensibus antrum: hec aquile volucres prestabunt munera pennas, atque Deo monstrante viam volitabis in altum. (874) Feed your brother’s hunger, to the weary offer cups of milk, visit the prisoner, clothe the naked; when you can, raise up the fallen, let the entrance of your cave be open to all; these services will lend you feathered eagle wings, and you will fly up to the height with God showing the way. (173)

Boccaccio’s intended audience is clearly not any figli cadetti, and his motive for writing the poem cannot be to project himself as sanctioned with special powers to communicate with the divine in order to motivate surviving children, by means of envy and sibling rivalry, to attempt to attain greater status in their father’s mind than a now angelic first son. Boccaccio may have intended this eclogue as a form of self-consolation for the grief he experienced on the heels of his daughter’s tragic passing.23 Its message to perform acts of charity in the practice of Christian virtue and in hopes of attaining salvation and a path toward beatitude in the afterworld is not nearly so ambiguous as Morelli’s intent in passing his Ricordi to his surviving children. Giovanni’s written communications with the dead represent one private, relatively circumscribed, yet powerful message, aimed at directing to his own ends the behaviour and actions of his living children.

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

155

Executor of the Estate/Executioner of One’s State (of Being): The Lessons of Petrarch’s Testamentum and Epistola posteritati That a child should die before a parent strikes most people not only as appallingly tragic but also as unnatural, since a child’s death does not respect the order of the progression of generations. More typical are the preparations that mature adults make for their own passing, including bequeathing possessions to children or to others they believe will survive them. These last wills or testaments are not examples of eidolopoeia, when the living cause the dead to speak, since they are the words of the living, often declared quite emphatically that they were made while in sound mind and body. However, these documents are not intended to be legally or publicly divulged until after the death of the ones who dictate them. For this reason, a testament may be written as if one were “speaking” from beyond the grave, indicating precisely to whom certain possessions should pass. Petrarch’s Testamentum (Last Will) opens with the admission: “Sepe de eo mecum cogitans de quo nemo nimis, pauci satis cogitant, de novissimis scilicet ac de morte” (“I have often reflected on a matter concerning which no one can reflect too much and only a few reflect enough, namely, the last things and death”).24 Indeed Petrarch may have thought about his end more than most people, given that he received more than one false report of his own death. According to Giovan Andrea Gesualdo, “Alcuni invidiosi del nome di [Petrarca] o vaghi d’impetrarsi i suoi beneficii, sparsero piú volte fama per Italia e per Provenza ch’egli era morto, essendo lor mal grado pur vivo” (Some men envious of [Petrarch’s] name or desirous to plead for his benefices repeatedly scattered reports in Italy and Provence that he was dead, though unfortunately for them he was still alive).25 Gesualdo noted that another “grido del suo morire per Italia non pur una volta si rinovellò” (419; alarm about his death throughout Italy not just one more time was renewed). This time, during the papacy of Pope Urban V (1362–70), Gesualdo wrote: non so chi, il quale dice aver saputo fingendo ch’egli era spento, gli amici in Provenza nella corte ed in Milano miserevolmente lo piansero: onde non pur la prebenda che il papa novellamente conferito gli avea e quel che conato lo Imperatore si diede altrui, ma tutti suoi benefici e quanti per allora ne possedeva e quanti dieci anni addietro a’ poveri suoi amici. (419)

156

Speaking Spirits

I do not know who said he feigned learning that [Petrarch] had died. Friends in the court in Provence and in Milan wept piteously for him. Then not only the prebend that the pope had recently conferred on him and the one which the emperor had approved were given to others, but all of the benefices that he then possessed as well as those that [Petrarch] had given some ten years earlier to his poor friends.

In light of the frenzy of envious men to seize Petrarch’s benefices and property following these false rumours of his death, the final sentence of Petrarch’s Testamentum rings especially harshly: “Ego Franciscus Petrarca scripsi, qui testamentum aliud fecissem, si essem dives, ut vulgus insanum putat” (“I, Francesco Petrarca, have written this, who would have drawn up a different testament if I were rich, as the mad rabble believes me to be,” 92–3). Armando Maggi has rightly emphasized the way that this text defies what one would anticipate from a standardized, strictly legalistic document; instead it is an “unforgettable self-portrait,” a “‘reflection’ on the meaning of [Petrarch’s] own death,” and most interestingly, an invitation to contemplate “an alternative and inexistent Petrarch.”26 Important for my present purposes is Petrarch’s elaborate discussion in his Testamentum of his instructions for his burial. Petrarch insisted, “Corpus autem hoc terrenum ac mortale, nobilium gravem sarcinam animorum, terre unde sibi origo est volo restitui et hoc absque omni pompa, sed cum summa humilitate et abiectione quanta esse potest” (“This earthly and mortal body, a heavy burden for noble souls, I wish to be returned to the earth from whence it drew its origin, and this to be done without any pomp but with utmost humility and all possible lowliness,” 70–1). He went on to claim, “De loco autem non magnopere curo” (“As to the burial place I do not care greatly,” 72–3), a statement that he immediately contradicted by offering not one place as a potential location for his tomb, but seven – in Padua, Arquà, Venice, Milan, Pavia, Rome, and Parma (catalogued along with details concerning specific churches, chapels, or cathedrals in each city).27 The Testamentum is hardly out of character for Petrarch. Many of his writings have as their focus death, the possibility of triumphing over death, and the purpose of life as an endeavour to leave a written legacy of oneself after death.28 Petrarch’s letters to the dead in his Rerum familiarum libri (or Familiares, Letters on Familiar Matters) voice his scholarly queries, his personal ambitions, and his priorities in what they

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

157

pointedly contain and what he prefers to leave unmentioned. These communications with the dead typically end with the reminder that they were “written in the land of the living.” Moreover, Petrarch also demonstrated other efforts to control or even micromanage public displays that concerned him. The most famous example was his careful choreography of his poet laureate ceremony, as indicated in his Epistola posteritati (Letter to Posterity), and it is to this astoundingly experimental composition that I now turn.29 The Epistola posteritati spans approximately ten pages, and Petrarch likely intended it to conclude another collection of his public circulating epistles, his Rerum senilium libri or Seniles (Letters of Old Age). He endeavoured to promote himself and his works, despite of the posture of humility and feigned self-doubt evident from his opening words: “Fuerit tibi forsan de me aliquid auditum – quamquam et hoc dubium sit, an exiguum et obscurum longe nomen seu locorum seu temporum perventurum sit – et illud forsitan optabis, nosse, quid hominis fuerim aut quis operum exitus meorum, eorum maxime, quorum ad te fama pervenerit” (“Possibly you will have heard something about me – although I am not sure whether my petty, obscure name will reach far into either space or time – and perhaps you will wish to know what kind of man I was or which works I wrote, especially those whose fame has reached you”).30 After a brief comment on the fickleness of public opinion, he begins his self-assessment with the seemingly difficult admission, “fui autem vestro de grege unus, mortalis homentio” (“I was one of your own troop, a mortal man,” 256–7). He mentions his descent from an old family and confesses to various sins of his youth, considering first and foremost his vanity, followed by his attitudes concerning the seven deadly sins. He claims to disagree with people who find his eloquence or writing style “claro ac potenti” (“clear and forcible”), since he believes it to be “fragili et obscuro” (“weak and obscure,” 262–3), before turning to a summary of his life: his birth, his family’s exile, and his travels and studies. Petrarch highlights key events in his life, including his stay in Vaucluse and the Good Friday inspiration to write his Africa. While scholars know (and no doubt Petrarch’s contemporaries did, too) that Petrarch worked doggedly to organize laurel ceremony invitations to both Paris and Rome, his version of the situation to posterity makes it seem as if – mirabile dictu! – though he was unworthy of such attention, he received two invitations to laureate crowning festivities on a single day (272–3). He preferred Rome, then in his later years embraced the clerical life and became – at

158

Speaking Spirits

the behest of Jacopo da Carrara the Younger– a canon of Padua. “But alas,” Petrarch moans, “among mortals nothing endures; and if anything nice happens, it soon ends in bitterness” (280–1; “Sed – heu – nichil inter mortales diuturnum, et si quid dulce se obtulerit, amaro mox fine concluditur”), announcing Jacopo’s death and his return to France, before the letter broke off in 1351. Though Petrarch did not die for a full twenty-three years, he did not choose to continue this narrative of his life. The Epistola posteritati shifts the narrative roles of literary compositions in a way that contrasts with examples of eidolopoeia presented thus far in this study. From Dante’s encounters with the spirits of the other world in his Commedia to Benivieni’s poetic representations of the dead (Dante, Pico), the author of eidolopoeia is the one who narrates, claiming to have heard a message from spirits of the deceased. In this way the authors of eidolopoeia claim control over the dead (how they represent spirits, what the message is, how it is to be presented and interpreted, etc.). The role of the reader is to accept the word of the eidolopoetic author (and to second whatever explicit or implicit recommendations the dialogue with the spirit might suggest: examine the state of one’s soul, assist in translating the remains of the dead in order to honour a memory, etc.). What Petrarch does in his “Letter to Posterity” is to figure himself, not as the living percipient of a spirit, but rather, I would argue, as the dead spirit speaking directly to his readers. Petrarch effectively takes away the intermediary, and in doing so, attempts to control more carefully his image and message. While some of Petrarch’s epistles in the Seniles or Familiares were addressed to living interlocutors, many others he addressed to famous predecessors, including Cicero, Seneca, Varro, Livy, and Homer. In these latter intentionally monological communications, Petrarch praised, critiqued, chided, and pleaded with souls of the esteemed dead, who he did not anticipate would respond.31 But why does Petrarch want to seem dead already, and what exactly is his message to us? Certainly by deliberately casting himself as another dead man, Petrarch cleverly writes himself into the company of his classical auctoritatis. Moreover, he aims to take charge of his image (or how he wished to be remembered) by writing the script of his legacy while he is still alive and can do it himself. He clearly does not want to depend on others to get it right. While ostensibly not a spirit of the dead, Petrarch in his pose as a voice from beyond the grave addressing the reader seeks to be accepted without question, even if aspects of it may seem downright mirabili. There is a

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

159

seriousness in another sentence from Petrarch’s Testamentum, the declaration that he intends as the expression of his last wishes: Si autem forte, quia omnes sumus mortales nec omnino ullus est ordo moriendi, dictus Franciscolus de Brossano, quod avertat Deus, ante me moreretur, tunc heres meus esto Lombardus a Serico predictus, qui plene animum meum novit, quem ut in vita fidelissimum expertus, non minus fidelem spero post obitum. But if by any chance, since we are all mortal and there is no set order for dying, the said Francescuolo da Brossano were to die before me – which may God avert – in that case my heir is to be the aforesaid Lombardo della Seta. He knows my mind fully, and I hope that he whom I have found to be most faithful during my lifetime will be no less faithful after my death. (90–1)

This statement almost suggests that Petrarch feared his final wishes would not be respected. When it is read alongside an earlier passage of the Testamentum, concerning the consequences of ignoring his requests to be buried without pomp, the reader can almost detect the expression of an unspecified threat: “hoc negligant, cum sic omnino me deceat ac sic velim, ita ut, si forte quod absit contrafecerint, teneantur Deo et mihi de gravi utriusque offensa in die iudicii respondere” (“For this request befits me so well and I wish it to such a degree that if they were to act against it – may that not happen – they ought to be held responsible to God and to me on the day of Judgment for such a grave offense against both God and myself,” 70–1). In other words, associates who disobey what is plainly decreed in his will, even if they should do so in an attempt to show him greater homage or honour, Petrarch vows, will be held to answer to God, as well as to his outraged ghost. The same fearsomeness could not possibly be achieved in a standard letter – one between living correspondents. Standard letters invite dialogue, and Petrarch is clearly not seeking to be queried, contradicted, or corrected. I see the “Letter to Posterity” as a form of eidolopoeia in reverse, in which the writer is not figured as the living interlocutor, but rather as the dead spirit speaking to the living. Petrarch may have seen this form as his best option to pre-write his legacy, to control his post-mortem image, and to fix with some finality his fama. The fama of the author is a double-edged sword. Fame (understood as a lofty and admired reputation) is necessary for the author

160

Speaking Spirits

to attain or retain his status as such, causing him to be remembered through his works as a paragon of literary achievement. But fame is also precisely what makes the author prey to invocations and representations, or more properly misrepresentations as a spirit after death. When Machiavelli conjured the spirit of Dante in his Dialogo intorno alla lingua nostra, he chose Dante because no other author could speak so authoritatively on his subject of the pre-eminence of the Florentine vernacular. Dante’s fame as the greatest author in that vernacular, most prominently through the example of his Commedia but also as founding theoretician on the subject in his Latin De vulgari eloquentia, made him the perfect mouthpiece for Machiavelli’s Renaissance rearticulation of the subject. However, the historical Dante would not have recognized the arguments that – as a spirit – Machiavelli placed anachronistically in the Dante character’s mouth. In his own time, Dante advocated an Italian vernacular capable of uniting the various regional peoples of the peninsula. Machiavelli relied on Dante’s fama to articulate through his spirit a substantively different intellectual position: against Italian or courtly languages, in preference for a strictly Florentine language. Dante’s reputation thus made him vulnerable to later misrepresentations and misappropriations of the kind that Machiavelli presented. The dead spirit represented in Renaissance eidolopoeia can thus be a doubly tragic figure, twice scorned, as in the case of Dante. During his lifetime, Florentines rejected him, leaving him to die in exile. Then, after his death, never succeeding in repatriating his remains for honourable burial within his beloved city’s walls, other Florentines feigned witnessing Dante’s ghostly apparition only to force him to state political and ideological positions as a spirit that he fundamentally would have opposed in life. While Petrarch died long before Machiavelli composed his eidolopoeia, he may have already understood the disturbing potentials of this act of appropriating a dead spirit. What is discernible in the silence, in the abrupt break at the end of Petrarch’s unfinished Epistola posteritati, is his grim encounter with the horror vacui, the full realization of his ultimate impotence at the point of death to determine his legacy. Just as he had rewritten the memory of Scipio and Ennius in his Africa, even though for the good from Petrarch’s perspective, others, including Malipiero, would subsequently recast Petrarch as a spirit (and believed that they were doing so for the better). Although Petrarch avidly sought fame, in spite of his laments concerning its toilsome burden, he may also have recognized that his fame might be precisely what prevented him from finding peace.32 Frail and

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

161

increasingly sickly in his advancing years, Petrarch composed Seniles VI, 2, addressing it to Boccaccio, bringing full circle his writings on Scipio and his own prospects for the end of his mortal life: Certe Africanus maior, ut vides, conversatione diutina viluit in oculis Romanorum. Quid minores putas in oculis aliorum? Crede michi, multis maximeque egris expedit interdum volvi nec est inconstantis sed prudentis pro varietate ventorum et tempestate negotiorum vela flectere. Non possunt literis cunta committi. Sed si que novi omnia et tu nosses, suaderes – certus sum – non dico ut discederem, sed ut quandoque secederem viteque fastidiis locorum alternatione consulerem. Proinde Deum ora ut fabelle huius nostre, que vita dicitur, finis bonus et sibi placitus sit.33 Certainly the elder Africanus, as you see, by a long abode lost his value in the eyes of the Romans. What do you suppose happens to lesser men in the eyes of others? Believe me, to many, and especially to the ill, an occasional change of scene is advantageous; and it is a mark not of inconstancy but of wisdom to turn one’s sails in accord with the variation of the winds and the tempest of affairs. All things cannot be entrusted to a letter; but if you knew everything I do, you would advise, I am sure – I do not say that I depart – but that I at some time take care of life’s unpleasantnesses by a change of places. Pray God, then, that the end of this tale of ours, which is called life, will be good and pleasing to him.34

Unfortunately for Petrarch, even very clumsy writers, such as Malipiero, as discussed in chapter 1, found ways to co-opt his post-mortem spirit and to rewrite entirely his legacy and image in ways that would likely have caused him to turn over in his grave. Petrarch understood that the act of appropriating a dead spirit held the potential, not just to pay homage, but also to slander, to debase, or otherwise to desecrate the memory of the defenceless deceased. Long before Jean-Paul Sartre, Petrarch must have intuited that “To be dead is to be a prey for the living. This means therefore that the one who tries to grasp the meaning of his future death must discover himself as the future prey of others.”35

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum Legal protections of habeas corpus have existed for many centuries. Habeas corpus (literally “you shall have the body”) refers to the legal writ through which a person can seek relief from arbitrary or unlawful

162

Speaking Spirits

possession or imprisonment of the body. The Oxford English Dictionary details the first use of the term in 1231, though the understanding of habeas corpus protections appeared as article 39 in the Magna Carta of 1215, and is believed to predate even this articulation by centuries in Anglo-Saxon common law.36 However, such codified treatment of the deceased body by a collective surviving Other failed to include particular protections for the deceased person’s spirit, or what I would call habeas spiritum. Perhaps the same legal question at the heart of assessing motive should be raised in the case of eidolopoeia as well: Cui bono? Who benefits from the invention and dissemination of eidolopoeia? Even in epideicdic examples, it is not the dead person being praised who reaps the advantage. In the tomb, what advantage could be gained? It does not belong to the dead “person” – honour is perhaps conferred on an idol of that person, but the real advantage goes to the one who “has” the spirit: the one who makes the idol in the first place. It is not surprising why injunctions against idol-making are so imperatively strong. Idols mask the agent (essere) with inevitable consequences for enti (human beings) and their reason for being, to say nothing of their (ultimately unfixable) state of being. Not even at the point of death, when one’s identity is literally written in stone, the tombstone or grave marker, is that persona truly fixed. While the bones may return to dust, in eidolopoeia the simulacrum of the person continues to appear and to speak at the potential service of anyone possessing the advantage of still living and writing. Because of the lapidary quality of the tomb’s text – typically carved in stone – it is usually not prolix: name, birth date, and date of death, sometimes accompanied by a blessing (i.e., rest in peace) or epithet (i.e., devoted mother, or soldier – fallen but not forgotten).37 The scarcity of words must somehow be in proportion to how seriously they are intended: the gravity of the grave’s message. Eidolopoeia transgresses what might be this “final word” by falsely representing the dead as speaking again. Throughout this study I have been interrogating the cultural contexts that permit the post-mortem refabrication of identity by others through eidolopoeia. If authors of future generations can so readily reappropriate the spirits of their predecessors, then there are consequences for our own identities as well. Whatever identities or legacies we might strive to leave in memory, after we die, we will no longer have any say in the matter. It is one thing for philosophers or theologians to theorize the powerlessness that limited mortals have to determine their (eternal) beingness; it is quite another to stare at one’s work and ponder if

Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum

163

death were to come in the next moment. For some scholars, perhaps most famously Harold Bloom, the fundamental problem in literary encounters of authors living and dead is a struggle for primacy, apophrades (or the return of the dead).38 But there is no literalization of apophrades, the dead do not really return; the dead can only be used to voice the message of the living author, who has no advantage in wishing his mouthpiece were otherwise. The author needs the dead to remain dead. The most basic level of the struggle is not so much with other writers, though this competition is undeniably ever-present. The fundamental battle concerns self-determination – the desire to assert one’s will now and (in human hopefulness) always – and the inevitable elusiveness of that quest. Sit tibi terra levis. May the earth rest lightly on you.39

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction. Eidolopoeia: Idol Making 1 This and all subsequent citations of Dante’s Divina commedia in the original Italian and in English translation are from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri in three volumes, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling with notes by Ronald L. Martinez (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011). The verse lines of the English translation occasionally do not correspond with the original, as in this case. 2 From the fourth volume of Quintilian, The Orator’s Education. Books 9–10, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 50–1. The emphasis is mine. 3 Henrik Specht is translating Priscian’s definitions here in “‘Ethopoeia’ or Impersonation: A Neglected Species of Medieval Characterization,” Chaucer Review 21.1 (1986): 5. See Heinrich F. Plett’s caution in Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 284: “Distinctions like these [between ethopoeia, pathopoeia, prosopopoeia, etc.], however, have only a limited validity in the Renaissance, since prosopopoeia is in some cases expanded to all fictional impersonations, and certain other categories are added for the purpose of specialization – eidolopoeia, for example, for the depiction of dead persons and anthropopatheia for the depiction of God.” Literary decorum was a requirement in impersonation and in the representation of the acts or speech of persons, since fictional portrayals had to be convincing and persuasive. Quintilian addresses ethopoeia’s relationship to mimesis at 9.2.58 (pp. 68–9 in Russell’s edition). See also Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton, and ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), especially 369–70.

166

Notes to pages 5–6

4 Basil Dufallo, The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to the Principate (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), noted that “most ancient rhetoricians distinguished between prosopopoeia, which could be used to have the dead speak as the dead (in which case it was sometimes called eidolopoeia [‘ghost-making’]), and ethopoeia or sermocinatio, the technique for introducing the speech of natural persons” (130n; the translation in the square brackets is in the original). 5 For the Trattatello I cite from the first redaction in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 3.481. The English translation is by James Robinson Smith, in The Earliest Lives of Dante Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1901]), 61. 6 H. Wayne Storey rightly reminds us that “authentic” Petrarchan manuscripts were “guaranteed by the poet’s own hand (that is, according to the rubric tradition in selected manuscripts such as Laurentian Segniano 1 from 1420–1430s ‘Scripto ipsa manu decti Poete’)” in “The Economies of Authority: Bembo, Vellutello, and the Reconstruction of ‘Authentic Petrarch’” in “Accessus ad Auctores”: Studies in Honor of Christopher Kleinhenz, ed. Fabian Alfie and Andrea Dini (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 495. 7 Like William Franke in Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), I am intrigued and inspired by Thomas M. Greene’s scholarly excavations in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Franke writes: “science (archaeology, philology) and its ‘method’ begin to come between past and present. The past no longer speaks except in an ersatz voice. It is an object for scientific analysis rather than a subject speaking with the wholeness and authority of an ‘auctor,’ for the humanist is positioned outside it and its hermeneutic horizon. He may ‘resurrect’ the past within his own present, but as something sham. Humanism in its relation to the past is dominated, Greene suggests, by the imagery of necromancy. Manipulative technologies of magic and science, which are hardly distinguishable at this stage, operate on objects in ways illustrative of the ‘necromantic superstition at the heart of the humanist enlightenment’ (Greene, Light in Troy, p. 93). According to Greene, ‘the image that propelled the humanist Renaissance and that still determines our perception of it, was the archeological, necromantic metaphor of disinterment, a digging up that was also a resuscitation or a reincarnation or a rebirth’ (p. 92). In a letter to Giovanni Colonna, Petrarch actually ventriloquizes the ruins (‘ruinae’) of Rome, as each step stirs tongue

Notes to pages 7–10

8

9 10

11

12

167

and mind: ‘Aderat … persingulos passus quod linguam et animum excitaret’ (p. 88). He is bodily taken over by the past, but in a step-by-step, fragmentary fashion, in what is clearly an image of magic as opposed to hermeneutic conversion and its transformation of the whole man through an altering of his horizons and his structural framework of selfunderstanding. The image of necromancy suggests how close humanism remains to the ideal of a living relation with the past, even while in possession merely of its corpse, now reanimated only by tricks and techniques of magic or science” (77). I cite the original from Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1929), 885. The English translation is provided by Allan H. Gilbert in Letters of Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 142. John M. Najemy provides an outstanding study of the correspondence in Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). I cite Machiavelli’s original from Opere letterarie, ed. Luigi Blasucci (Milan: Adelphi, 1964), 222. In fact, anytime that authors portrayed (or did not portray) living people as characters in literary works, they might have run the risk of offending their peers. Machivelli’s assessment of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and in particular its list of contemporary celebrities in the final canto, is among the most notable: “Veramente il poema è bello tutto, et in molti luoghi mirabile … mi dolgo solo che, avendo ricordati tanti poeti, che mi abbia lasciato indietro come un […]” (Truly the poem is lovely throughout, and wondrous in many passages … I am sorry only that, having remembered so many poets, [Ariosto] left me out like a […]). The letter, dated 17 December 1517 to Lodovico Alamanni, is number 46 in “Lettere familiari” of the Opere of Machiavelli published by Alcide Parenti in Florence in 1816. The citation appears in volume 8, pp. 153–4. Scholars have since provided the vulgarity elided in this edition: “cazo” (in Machiavelli’s spelling, signifying the male sexual organ). Quite useful in the consideration of classical examples is Mario Erasmo’s Reading Death in Ancient Rome (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), though his scholarly focus moves beyond eidolopoeia/prosopopoeia to include epitaphs, inscriptions on tombs, funereal performances, etc. In the Pro Caelio, for example, Cicero speaks through the spirit of Appius Claudius Caecus. The censor is summoned from the grave to refute the charges of aurum et venenum (gold and poison) levelled against his defendant, Caelius. According to Dufallo, the spirit of Appius blames

168

13

14 15

16

Notes to pages 11–12

instead his own descendant Clodia, whom the ghost accuses of being carried away by lust for Caelius: “Through Appius, Cicero stigmatizes Clodia’s brother and his own political archrival, Clodius: he juxtaposes a prosopopoeia of the latter with his performance as the grave Censor, Appius, whose stature helps to set in relief the moral laxity he imputes to Clodius. Appius acts, at the same time, as an exemplum of gravitas. He recalls a series of his own achievements and those of other exemplary men and women from the Claudian gens of which he is patriarch. Cicero exploits Appius’ gravity to lend authority to his attack upon Clodia and her brother, Clodius, and to his own public persona. He seeks to magnify his own image and belittle that of his opponents through aligning himself with the most august civic traditions, as embodied by Appius” (The Ghosts of the Past, 78). Other classical literary scholars, including Sarah Iles Johnston and D. Felton, argue that ancient Greek and Roman authors typically featured whining spirits of the dead that express personal dissatisfaction with unresolved aspects of their own passing, including the need to receive proper burial or the desire to incite revenge for an untimely death. Dufallo, The Ghosts of the Past, 1–2. According to Ronald C. Finucane in Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982), 85: “Medieval apparitions of the dead functioned on many levels. To take the longest view, in the first place they reinforced belief in a life beyond death. Though this is so obvious that in the Middle Ages it was usually unstated or even unperceived, in a later era it will become practically the only purpose behind such phenomena. Secondly, these supernatural beings reinforced teachings about punishment and reward after death according to Catholic doctrine and dogma … Thirdly, and more specifically, these encounters clarified and nourished the belief in purgatory, especially from the twelfth century, and the belief that the living, through the church, ought to assist the dead … Finally, the medieval narrations emphasize a broad spectrum of ethical and social desiderata.” Some scholars have been especially keen to distinguish between ghost stories and otherworldly journeys. For example, Jean-Claude Schmitt in Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pointed out that in visions and voyages to the other world, the visionary encounters souls of the dead that, through their example of eternal pain or blessedness, serve to impart moral lessons to readers. In ghost stories, on the other hand, it is the spirit that crosses the threshold between life

Notes to page 12

169

and death to speak with and among the living. The ghostly apparitions for Schmitt represent a kind of journey to the other world in reverse. According to Schmitt, “Apparitions of ghosts represented a reverse movement between the dead and the living in the travels to the hereafter – from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid to the Divine Comedy of Dante, including Saint Patrick’s Purgatory – visionaries encountered the souls of the dead whom they themselves had once known on earth or whose names and renown had come to their attention. But the goal of such revelations was not, as a general rule, to account for the fate of a specific dead person in the hereafter (with the exception of certain rulers, in highly ‘political’ visions). Rather, the goal was to reveal to the living, to the listeners or readers of the visio, the geography of the places of the hereafter: the steep paths, the frozen rivers, the furnaces, and the list of tortures beyond the grave – throughout the centuries the great reservoirs of the Western imaginary … Ghosts, on the other hand, still had one foot on the ground, so to speak: they had just departed from the living, to whom they later appeared and from whom they seemed not to be able to separate themselves … With tales of ghosts, the historian is also immediately confronted with all the complexities of the social relationships that existed between the living and the dead, who returned again to visit those still living. Thus, unlike the great visions of the hereafter, ghost tales concentrated on the status of the deceased, who was an ordinary person” (1–2). I prefer to focus less on who or what fictively crosses that boundary between the realms of the living and the dead and more on the invention of the speech of the characters figured as dead and the rhetorical potential of the message. 17 One of a multitude of potential examples is Ariosto’s ghost of the pagan warrior Argalìa appearing to the Spanish knight, Ferraù, in the first canto of the Orlando furioso (The Madness of Orlando, 1532 in its final version). It is as if these characters already “lived” because they figured in earlier epics, most prominently in the Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love) by Matteo Maria Boiardo (1440/41–94), though they are purely figments of the imagination. In Ariosto’s version, Ferraù accidentally loses his helm in a stream, which prompts the ghost of Argalìa to rise out of the water and rebuke the Spaniard for not fulfilling his promise (made in Boiardo’s poem) to return Argalìa’s helm to him. Shame from the just rebuke prompts Ferraù to resolve not to wear any other helm than the one that Orlando possessed and to hasten to search for him. Thus, Ariosto uses the ghost figure in this case as a narrative ploy at the outset of his work to remind readers of the plot of Boiardo’s precedent, while propelling forward the action of his own highly imaginative narrative. Literary

170

18

19

20

21

Notes to pages 12–13

ghosts, like this one, clearly have different uses and motivations from the spirit characters of historical figures. These creatures do not possess human identities and thus have little to contribute to the present investigation of constructions of identity and post-mortem legacies. For the same reason, I exclude consideration of other types of personifications (of inanimate objects, cities, entire populations, animals, qualities [such as Liberty], etc.). Among the scholars who have offered outstanding perspectives on aspects of the Italian Renaissance supernatural (demons, witches, etc.), which present quite different considerations from the representations of the historical dead, are Armando Maggi, Walter Stephens, Douglas Biow, Nancy Caciola, Marjorie B. Garber, and Wayne Shumaker. It is difficult not to notice a gender divide between predominantly female religious visionaries and male secular authors of eidolopoeia. Though these categories have their exceptions, I might venture to hypothesize that the nature of the divine messages may have a determining influence on the gender divarication of religious and secular otherworldly encounters. Broadly generalizing, female religious visionaries tend to communicate with Mary or Christ, or deceased spiritual advisers or family members, who offer messages on the endurance of suffering, comfort in tribulation, encouragement in faith and prayer, or some kind of succour for the visionary’s living peers. Spiritual nuptials with Jesus also find articulation, oftentimes by men who write down the accounts for women visionaries of limited literacy (which becomes an important, but not often clearly acknowledged frame for these narratives – that is, the narratives take on the perspective and authority of the male scribe, not the female speaker). Catherine of Siena’s visions prominently contain political opinions (i.e. the pope/anti-pope querelle), though male authors of eidolopoeia more frequently feign passing along otherworldly messages that concern politics, exile, or other information intended to bolster worldly status, authority, or estimation. For more detailed considerations of hagiographic speech and the representation of saints, please see the volumes by Alison Knowles Frazier, Peter Brown, and Timothy Verdon and John Henderson. The vast majority of the characters Dante-pilgrim hears speak during the journey are, in “Virgil”’s words, “no longer, though once [they were],” that is, “they” were once historical, living, individual, identifiable human beings but are “now” deceased. In addition to Virgil and Beatrice, they are Homer, Francesca da Rimini, Ciacco, Filippo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, Pier delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, Iacopo

Notes to page 14

171

Rusticucci, Guido Guerra, Tegghaio Aldobrandi, Reginaldo Scrovegni, Venedico Caccianemico, Alessio Interminei, Pope Nicholas III, Ciampolo of Navarre, Catalano dei Malavolti, Vanni Fucci, Cianfa Donati, Agnello dei Brunelleschi, Francesco de’ Cavalcanti, Ulysses, Guido da Montefeltro, Mohammed, Pier da Medicina, Mosca, Bertran de Born, Griffolino, Capocchio, Master Adam, Sinon of Troy, Camiscion de’ Pazzi, Bocca degli Abati, Buoso da Duera, Ugolino, Cato of Utica, Casella, Manfred, Belacqua, Jacopo del Cassero, Buonconte da Montefeltro, Pia of Siena, Sordello, Nino Visconti, Conrad Malaspina, Omberto degli Aldobrandeschi, Oderisi da Gubbio, Sapia of Siena, Guido del Duca, Rinieri da Calboli, Marco Lombardo, an unnamed Abbot of San Zeno (perhaps Gerard, who died in 1187 [see the notes by Martinez and Durling in Purgatorio, p. 306]), Pope Adrian V, Hugh Capet, Statius, Forese Donati, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizelli, Arnaut Daniel, Piccarda Donati, the Emperor Justinian, Charles Martel, Cunizza d’Este, Folquet, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Cacciaguida, Solomon, Peter Damian, Benedict of Nursia, Peter, James, John, Adam, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Granted, the historical lives of some of these figures are not easy to trace (Adam, most notably). Some excluded figures do not readily correspond to historical identities (especially Matelda). Some speakers are not individuals (the Eagle in the heavenly sphere of Jupiter). Others, such as Frate Alberigo, are portrayed as not yet dead, and thus would be more properly termed doppelgängers. For Giovanni Papini, Dante Vivo (Florence: Barbèra, Alfani e Venturi, 1933), 339–40: “Dante è il più grande poeta dei morti. Eppure, se ben guardate, la morte, nel suo poema, non c’è … I morti di Dante somigliano in quasi tutto ai vivi: parlano, ricordano, rimpiangono, profetizzano, insegnano” (“Dante is the greatest poet of the dead. But on careful examination, we see that in his poem there is no such thing as death … The dead of Dante resemble the living in almost every way. They speak, they remember, they lament, they prophesy, they teach”). The English translation is by Eleanor Hammond Broadus and Anna Benedetti (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 259. Of course, none of the above-mentioned spirit actions is possible for Dante the author without eidolopoeia. 22 In M.L. McLaughlin’s words in “Humanism and Italian Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 224: “In a sense Dante ‘discovered’ the Aeneid, in that he was the first to make Virgil talk again to his age after centuries of silence. As he himself was aware, he was the first Italian writer to read the Roman poet in both a political and intertextually creative way – the latter is alluded to in Dante’s famous address to Virgil when he meets

172

Notes to page 14

him in the first canto of the whole Commedia: ‘You are the single author from whom I derived the fine style which has brought me such honour.’” On Dante’s character of Virgil in the context of scholarly precedent, see Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 307–29. 23 This was the argument forwarded by Mowbray Allan in the article “Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation,” Modern Language Notes 104 (1989): 193–205. Contrary views are ultimately more convincing. See especially the response to Allan by Teodolinda Barolini, where she argues, “The pilgrim may hope for Vergil’s salvation, but the poet wills otherwise … It is, therefore, from a textual point of view, spurious to speculate about Vergil’s salvation” (“Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question,” in Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)],157). See also the recent essays from differing perspectives by Ed King (“Saving Virgil,” 83–106) and Mira Gerhard (“Sacrificing Virgil,” 107–19), both in Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, ed. James Miller (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005). 24 Critical scholarship has mapped in detail the narratological distinction between Dante-poet and Dante-pilgrim in the Commedia. From the duality of voices of “Dante” within the poem – the pilgrim making the journey in 1300 and the poet subsequently looking back on and writing about his experience – I distinguish the historical man who wrote the Commedia, referring to him as Dante-author. In the process of forwarding his influential vision of the many facets of Dante’s authorship, Ascoli confronted the question of what made Dante into a modern “author” in his groundbreaking work, Dante and the Making of the Modern Author. He charted Dante’s “place within a complex social and discursive history” and his “continous, if evolving, understanding of his authorship as an activity of ‘making,’ at once the artisinal mastery of the techne of poetry (and, more broadly, the disciplines of rhetoric, philosophy, and theology) and an imitatio of the Divine Maker, the Author of all authors, the origin of every legitimate authority” (x). Ascoli goes on to identify more specific authorities, as Dante understood them: “supreme institutional authorities,” including emperor and pope, “canonical classical writers” (Aristotle, Virgil), “poetic authorship taken in isolation,” and “God as supreme Author and Authority” (8). And Ascoli succeeds in detailing and distinguishing the weighty contributions of previous scholars (including but certainly not limited to Leo Spitzer, Charles S. Singleton, Francis

Notes to page 14

173

Ferguson, Gianfranco Contini, John Freccero, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Patrick Boyde, Lucia Battaglia Ricci, and Teodolinda Barolini), especially in chapters 1 and 7. 25 Scholarly debates concerning the nature of Latini’s sin continue to rage at an astounding rate of publication. Peter Armour lucidly categorizes the critical sides of this debate in his entry on Latini in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 2000). As he notes, recent criticism has attempted to argue that Latini’s “sin of Sodom” is not sexual, but rather an intellectual sin against nature. For André Pézard, this takes the form of Latini’s rejection of his Florentine language by writing the Trésor in French; for Richard Kay, it is Latini’s political position against the empire; and for Armour, for instance, it is Latini’s “quasiManichaean rejection of the doctrine of the goodness of human nature” (128). These are truly excellent studies; nonetheless, since Dante’s day, there remain decidedly sexual associations with Latini’s legacy. Alan Stewart in Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) does an outstanding job of demonstrating how sodomy, in spite of the fact that it is “investigated and punished as an act,” begins as a “cry” in its biblical derivation in the “cry of Sodome and Gomorrah” of Genesis 19: “in other words, there may or may not be any truth to the historicity of the act of sodomy, if what matters is the convincing quality of the accusation (the rhetoric)” (xxi–xxii). At a very late stage in the preparation of this book, Justin Steinberg’s work Dante and the Limits of the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) came to my attention. Steinberg argues persuasively in his first chapter on infamia that in a system that valorized verisimilitude as a legal basis for conviction, Dante deliberately chose well-respected Florentines to further his message throughout the Divina commedia that the dead’s salvation or damnation did not depend on doxa, what people think they know, and by extension to rehabilitate his own reputation as an exile and condemned criminal. See 37ff. 26 Please see also the arguments made by Mark Doty in his keen essay “Rooting for the Damned,” in The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 376: “Oh, but it is the pilgrim Dante, the character who approves and lauds. The poet Dante has ‘outed’ Latini – who was not known as a sodomite in his own time – and placed him in the depths of Hell. It is not an attractive gesture, and it raises inevitable questions: who is this poet who so energetically conjures a world of torture, an endlessly imaginative range of ways to exact revenge? Suddenly the pitying,

174

27

28

29 30 31

32

Notes to pages 14–16

awestruck pilgrim seems disingenuous, the ethical terms of the entire poem thrown in question. Doesn’t he lament, with one side of his mouth, the cruelty of the universe, while with the other he – quite literally – makes it so?” See also Gary P. Cestaro, “Queering Nature, Queering Gender: Dante and Sodomy,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 94–5: “The distinction between acts and identities, however, is particularly problematic when we come to Dante’s sodomites, especially in the Inferno. The modern commentary tradition has repeatedly noted that there is no independent written record of Brunetto Latini (or Priscian, for that matter) having been a sodomite. But the poetic logic of the Inferno bestows upon all the sinners in cantos 15–16 eternal identities as sodomites as it imposes eternal identities upon all its sinners. The sinner steps up to Minos and ‘tutta si confessa’ – out comes the eternal character (see Inf 5.1–15). In Dante’s universe, ser Brunetto takes on an essential identity as a sodomite, no matter that he had a wife and children in his earthly life (pace – most recently – Peter Armour). In this poetic sense, at least, Dante gives us ‘homosexuals’ avant la lettre, without the help of nineteenthcentury medical or legal discourse.” See John S. Carroll, Prisoners of Hope (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), 7; John Ciardi leaves Cato’s fate a bit more ambiguous (a “special triumph” at the Final Judgment) in his translation and exposition of The Purgatorio (New York: New American Library, 1961), 38. Other critics labour to clarify an understanding of free will or political virtue (for example, John A. Scott in Dante’s Political Purgatory [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996]) that might explain Cato’s status as guardian of the mountain. Erich Auerbach, Dante Poet of the Secular World in the translation by Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 134. Auerbach, Dante Poet of the Secular World, 86. Inf. 27.100–5: “Tuo cor non sospetti:/finor t’assolvo, e tu m’insegna fare / sì come Penestrino in terra getti./Lo ciel poss’io serrare e diserrare, / come tu sai; però son due le chiavi/che ’l mio antecessor non ebbe care” (“Let not your heart fear: henceforth I absolve you, if you teach me how to raze Palestrina to the ground. Heaven I can lock and unlock, as you know; for that reason the keys are two which my predecessor did not prize.”) Another form of the word, idolatre, is used at Inf. 19.113 in the midst of a scathing critique of the Donation of Constantine, but it is not used with the same significance as idolo.

Notes to pages 18–19

175

33 Among those who have put forth this argument is Renato Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno,” PMLA 72.3 (1957): 313–58. 34 In the final passage of Plato’s dialogue concerning the ideal form of government, the character of Socrates relates to Glaucon the story of Er the Pamphylian. Er’s fellow citizens found him dead on the field of battle and sent his body home for funeral rites. As he lay on the pyre, Er purportedly reanimated and told his amazed listeners about what happens to one’s soul after death, namely that the human soul is immortal and that one’s place in the afterlife depends on the virtuous or shameful qualities of one’s soul, as demonstrated during mortal life. 35 This is also the source and favourite classical reference of Florentine Matteo Palmieri’s work in praise of citizens who make sacrifices on behalf of their homelands, Vita civile (On Civic Life, c. 1439), which incidentally contains an intriguing example of a speaking spirit of Dante’s unnamed friend who died in the Battle of Campaldino in 1289. This spirit praises fellow patriot Vieri de’ Cerchi, who also perished in battle, and explains to Dante a vision of blessedness accorded in the afterlife to the courageous defenders of one’s country. Palmieri’s opinion – that serving the republic is the primary humanist virtue – seems to take on greater authority when he articulates it by means of a dead spirit, in this case of a heroic Florentine soldier granted a vision of the other world guided by none other than “Charlemagne.” Palmieri clearly aims to praise Dante in this narrative as well, especially given how frequently Dante’s name recurs in the text. While both the spirit of the soldier and that of Charlemagne describe a Neoplatonic/Christian other world that differs in various ways from Dante’s version in the Commedia, this narrative may also intend to imply why Dante composed the Commedia in the first place. Palmieri may be suggesting that already in 1289 Dante had conceived the idea of communing with the dead in order to discuss the virtues that would earn man honour in the both this life and the next. The ethical import of creating speaking spirits would not be lost on Palmieri’s contemporaries and subsequent authors who would employ it to articulate their own views and judgments. See chapter 2. Another important Renaissance example of the redeployment of the Somnium Scipiones appears in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), specifically Goffredo’s dream in canto 14. For a detailed reading of Tasso’s use of the dream vision, see the third chapter of James Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic: Petrarch to Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

176

Notes to pages 19–22

36 An excellent analysis of Petrarch’s Scipio the elder with respect to Cicero’s Scipio the younger and the ideological motivations for their projects is provided by Aldo S. Bernardo in Petrarch, Scipio and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962). 37 This and subsequent English translations of the Africa are by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). The book and verse numbers I cite refer to the original Latin text, since the verse numbers in the English translation do not always correspond precisely. 38 Petrarch’s Africa, trans. Bergin and Wilson, 243. 39 The spirit of Homer continues: “Florentina omnis magis ut sit grata propago/Idem unus tibi, Roma, dabit, nec protinus urbem/Peniteat Tusci fundasse ad gurgitis undam./Hic quoque magnorum laudes studiosus avorum/Digeret extrema relegens ab origine fortes/Romulidas, vestrumque genus sermone soluto/Historicus, titulosque urbis et nomina reddet./In medio effulgens nec corpore parvus eodem/Magnus erit Scipio: seque ipse fatebitur ultro/Plus nulli debere viro” (Africa 9.254–63; “’Tis he, O Rome, who shall endear to you/the folk of Florence, nor shall you repent/of having founded on the Tuscan stream/that daughter town. Zealous in study, he/will sing the glories of the men of old/and trace from their first origins the sons/of Romulus; a faithful chronicler,/in syllables unfettered he will tell/of your great race, its titles and its clans./Wherein, resplendent and by no means least,/great Scipio will stand, and he who writes/will openly admit indebtedness/to him above all heroes of the past”). 40 See also Craig Kallendorf’s excellent treatment of the work in In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), 23ff. 41 See especially the fundamental studies by Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), and Ernst H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1959). 42 According to Germaine Greer, who wrote the Foreword to J.G. Nichols’s translation of My Secret Book (London: Hesperus Press, 2002), vii–viii: “It has been suggested that there was nothing private let alone secret about My Secret Book, but there is no evidence that any of Petrarch’s contemporaries actually saw it and it does not figure in the lists of works that he compiled for various of his patrons. Three of his closest friends, Boccaccio, Francesco Nelli and Barbato da Sulmona, mention some such book but can say of it no more than that it was some kind of Ciceronian

Notes to pages 23–5

43

44

45

46

47 48 49

177

dialogue … No copy of My Secret Book was made in Petrarch’s lifetime; it has survived only in a copy made from Petrarch’s autograph after his death by Tedaldo della Casa, a Franciscan friar from Florence. The original is lost.” Citations of the original Secretum come from Petrarch’s Prose, ed. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955), 22. The translation by Nichols here and following is from the above-cited volume. Truth appealed to “Augustine” with the words: “nisi te presens forte felicitas miseriarum tuarum fecit immemorem, multa tu, dum corporeo carcere claudebaris, huic similia pertulisti” (24; “unless the blessedness you now enjoy makes you forgetful of all unhappiness, you know that you yourself suffered much, and in much the same way, while you were still imprisoned in your body” (4). According to David Marsh in “The Burning Question: Crisis and Cosmology in the Secret,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 217. In another letter (Sen. 11.10) to Lombardo da Serico dated 29 November 1370, Petrarch calls life the “hardened ground of our toils, the training camp of crises, a theatre of deceits, a labyrinth of errors … a forgetful journey, hatred of the fatherland, love of exile, a city of goblins and ghosts, a kingdom of demons, a principality of Lucifer, for that is what the truth calls the prince of this world; in short, a lying, breathless life, a breathing death, sluggish carelessness about one’s self, worry over useless things, concern for appearances, an appetite for the superfluous, a painstaking preparation for the worms, a living hell, an elaborate funeral procession of living bodies, a lingering burial, pompous vanity, an exhausting campaign, dangerous temptation, proud misery, and pitiful happiness. That, dear friend, is how I view life … There is only one good thing in all the bad: unless one deserts the right path, it is the way to a good eternal life.” Francis Petrarch, Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII), trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2:413. Sen. 1.5, trans. Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo, Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII), 1:16. Sen. 1.5, trans. Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo, Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII), 1:17. Vittorio Zaccaria addressed the difficulties in dating the different redactions of this work in his introduction to De casibus in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca et al., vol. 9 (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), xv–xx.

178

Notes to pages 25–7

50 Boccaccio’s representation of a parade of spirits imitates various classical antecedents, perhaps most notably the one in Virgil’s Aeneid 6.1014ff in which the spirit of Anchises points out to his son Aeneas the illustrious figures of Dardan ancestry before foretelling the generations of Italian descent. 51 All citations of the original text of De casibus come from the aforementioned edition by Vittore Branca. While I am greatly indebted to the English translation by Louis Brewer Hall under the title The Fates of Illustrious Men (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1965), some of the renderings here and following are my own. 52 According to Ascoli, who carefully traces the connotations of fabula in Petrarch from Cicero and Horace through medieval uses of the term in his lecture and essay “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes His Readers (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 2010), 20: “In this period, Italian ‘favola’ can be used to indicate either a literary composition or a ‘pack of lies,’ though it seems clear that there is a genealogical if not genetic relationship between the two senses, and that in this case, with its intense meta-literary focus, both are operative.” 53 Moreover, it may also be the case that the passive role that Boccaccio fashions for himself of merely writing down what others dictate to him, rather than exercising greater authorial creativity, saps his writerly vitality. 54 I quote the Italian text from Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 5; the English translation is by Ronald L. Martinez in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3. 55 Citing from Sancti Nili and John Cassian, Agamben writes: “Lo sguardo dell’accidioso si posa ossessivamente sulla finestra e, con la fantasia, egli si finge l’immagine di qualcuno che viene a visitarlo … di nuovo li rimette [gli occhi] sul libro, va avanti per qualche riga, ribalbettando la fine di ogni parola che legge; e intanto si riempie la testa con calcoli oziosi, conta il numero delle pagine e i fogli dei quaderni; e gli vengono in odio le lettere e le belle miniature che ha davanti agli occhi, finché, da ultimo, richiude il libro e lo usa come cuscino per il suo capo, cadendo in un sonno breve e non profondo … Non appena questo demone comincia ad ossessionare la mente di qualche sventurato, gli insinua dentro un orrore del luogo in cui si trova, un fastidio della propria cella e uno schifo dei fratelli che vivono con lui, che gli sembrano ora negligenti e grossolani. Lo fa diventare inerte a ogni attività … ed ecco che il disgraziato comincia a lagnarsi … querimoniosamente si proclama inetto a far fronte a qualsiasi compito dello spirito e si affligge di starsene svuotato e immobile sempre nello

Notes to page 29

179

stesso punto, lui che avrebbe potuto essere utile agli altri e guidarli, e non ha invece concluso nulla né giovato a chicchessia. Si profonde in sperticati elogi di monasteri assenti e lontani ed evoca i luoghi dove potrebbe essere sano e felice …” (6; “The gaze of the slothful man rests obsessively on the window, and with his fantasy, he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him … Again he gazes at the book, proceeds for a few lines, mumbling the end of each word he reads; and meanwhile he fills his head with idle calculations, he counts the number of pages and the sheets of the bindings, and he begins to hate the letters and the beautiful miniatures he has before his eyes, until, at the last, he closes the book and uses it as a cushion for his head, falling into a brief and shallow sleep … As soon as this demon begins to obsess the mind of some unfortunate one, it insinuates into him a horror of the place he finds himself in, an impatience with his own cell, and a disdain for the brothers who live with him, who now seem to him careless and vulgar. It makes him inert before every activity … and behold the wretched one begin to complain … Querulously he proclaims himself inept at facing any task of the spirit and afflicts himself with being always empty and immobile at the same point, he who might have been useful to others and guided them, and who has instead not concluded anything or benefited anyone. He plunges into exaggerated praise of distant and absent monasteries and evokes the places where he could be healthy and happy …” 3–4). Boccaccio perceives this horror not so much as one of place (such as a monastic cell) as existential: he toils through writing without the imagined satisfaction to be gleaned from rest or leisure. Boccaccio the “wretched” character bemoans not the convent of his community of brothers, resorting to “exaggerated praise of distant and absent monasteries,” but rather a present that causes him to fancy distant stories of illustrious people. But here, too, is a “proximity so intolerable” that it brings shame to Boccaccio, who recognizes that his own “life” after death in the memory of others depends on the very act he must strive to complete on behalf of these illustrious predecessors. Agamben, citing Thomas Aquinas, states it even more boldly: “acedia è precisamente il vertiginoso e spaurito ritrarsi (recessus) di fronte all’impegno della stazione dell’uomo davanti a Dio” (10; “acedia is precisely the vertiginous and frightened withdrawal [recessus] when faced with the task implied by the place of man before God,” 6). 56 Jason Houston emphasized other allusions by Boccaccio to Dante in his study, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as “Dantista” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 67. For example, the words of Petrarch’s doppelgänger to the indolent character of Boccaccio in De casibus 8.1 – “Quid

180

57

58

59

60

Notes to pages 30–5

iaces, ociorum professor egregie? Quid falsa inertie suasione torpescis?” (Why do you sleep, o excellent master of tranquillity? Why do you laze about persuaded by false idleness?) – echo Cato’s rebuke of Dante in Purgatorio 2. See also Massimo Miglio’s analysis in this regard in “Boccaccio biografo” in Boccaccio in Europe: Proceedings of the Boccaccio Conference, Louvain, December 1975, ed. Gilbert Tournoy (Louvain: Leuvan University Press, 1977), 149–64. Citing Vittore Branca, Miglio argues (150–2) that the way exemplars are remembered indicates a difference between Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s attitudes toward history and historiography. According to Houston, “In this passage, the spirit of Petrarca completely isolates fame derived from literary excellence from the political fame that is at the heart of Boccaccio’s text. According to Boccaccio’s Petrarca, the author’s invention can overcome the deformities of a man’s body, which, in the genre of political biography[,] usually indicate an ethical deformity, and create a figure that will gain fame. Petrarca does not interest himself with writing the history of events or lives; instead he uses historical figures, regardless of their true nature, to serve his purpose of literary invention. Petrarca ultimately aims at his own literary fame over historical or ethical veracity” (Building a Monument to Dante, 68), In this respect, Houston is correct in his conclusion that “this passage continues the project of figuring Dante as a poet eternally concerned with the political past, present, and future of Florence” (Building a Monument to Dante, 71). However, one must be careful, where eidolopoeia is concerned, not to fall into fallacies of agency that require further clarification. Houston continues on the same page: “The task that Boccaccio has Dante set before him in the De Casibus is specifically political. First, Dante asks Boccaccio to describe Walter’s abuses of power that his tyranny might be exposed. Second, Dante wants Boccaccio to show that Florence, in exiling him and welcoming Walter, suffers from a grievous lack of wisdom in her citizens’ political decisions. Just as Cacciaguida gives Dante the pilgrim his poetic charge as a poet in Paradiso XVII, so here Dante gives Boccaccio his orders.” Dante “sets before [Boccaccio],” “asks,” and “wants” nothing, of course, since “Dante” (the spirit) is merely a projection of Boccaccio’s own imagination, just as “Cacciaguida” became one of the political mouthpieces for Dante’s own views in the Commedia. Stephen Greenblatt addressed a similar, though not identical, concern: “It is paradoxical,” he noted at the outset of Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), “to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there

Notes to pages 37–8

181

was no bodily being to begin with. But those who love literature tend to find more intensity in simulations – in the formal, self-conscious miming of life – than in any of the other textual traces left by the dead, for simulations are undertaken in full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent, and hence they may skillfully anticipate and compensate for the vanishing of the actual life that has empowered them” (1). In tracing the differences between addressing a figure of the past and attributing speech to that figure in early theories of prosopopoeia in the works of Abraham Fraunce and John Hoskyns, Gavin Alexander concludes, “Both sets of theorists see that something of very fundamental significance occurs when a voice is created, speaking in address to another, that the power to conjure up human presences and endow them with speaking voices is not just a momentary trick of the orator but is the basis of the making of fictions. Whether we come at the figure from the direction of Elizabethan rhetorical theory or from that of modern critical theory, we can see that prosopopoeia engages with, and is implicated in, many different degrees and forms of personation. And we can recognise that these various shades of literary personation are being investigated continuously in many works of Renaissance English literature.” “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108. 1. Rewriting the Auctor: Revising according to the Text’s Letter or Spirit? 1 See Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xvii–xxii. 2 Citations from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in Latin and English are from Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For Bagli’s edition, I cite from Boccaccio, Le opere de misser Giovanni Boccaccio De mulieribus claris (Venice: Zuanne de Trino, 1506), held in the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. I have selectively modernized the spelling. 3 According to F. Regina Psaki and Thomas Stillinger, editors of Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: Annali d’Italianistica, 2006), 2. 4 Virginia Brown documents the various stages of work’s composition in the introduction to her edition of Boccaccio’s Famous Women, xi–xii: “The nucleus of this innovative work, consisting in its final form of 104 chapters, was written at Certaldo between the summer of 1361 and the summer of

182

5

6 7

8

9 10

Notes to pages 39–42

1362. It was dedicated to Andrea Acciaiuoli, Countess of Altavilla, a Tuscan noblewoman living in southern Italy. Andrea was the sister of Niccolò Acciaiuoli, an old friend of Boccaccio who was a member of an eminent Florentine family and a major power behind the throne of Joanna, Queen of Naples.” In later stages, Boccaccio wrote “the present chapters XXXI and LXXX … [eliminated] three doublets … [inserted] three new chapters [and] a conclusion” (xiii), etc., bringing the work to the 106-chapter form of her critical edition. Rhiannon Daniels provides an excellent study of these paratexts in Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340–1521 (London and Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2009). Further references appear in the text. If others were aware that there was such a virtuous paragon in their Perugian milieu, they were remarkably reticent about it. The error that Bagli produced the translation has persisted at least since Niccola Francesco Haym’s assertion in Biblioteca italiana, o sia notizia de’ libri rari italiani, vol. 2 (of 2) (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1773), 168. As Daniels correctly summarizes, “De mulieribus was translated into Italian as early as 1367 and twice more before the end of the century” (Boccaccio and the Book, 165–6). She bases her conclusions on previous studies by Laura Torretta, Antonio Altamura, Claudio Scarpati, Vittorio Zaccaria, Pamela Joseph Benson, and Stephen Kolsky. Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. Brown, xiv. Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 1. It is Kolsky who inserts “Baglioni” in square brackets here. Moreover, it is inexact to assert, as Kolsky does on the same page: “In the preface to this translation, the long-dead author appears to the translator” (my emphasis). Not only is Bagli not the translator, but it is not the long-dead author who appears to him, but rather a representation of Boccaccio’s spirit. But Kolsky is correct in his subsequent assessment: “No doubt these three modifications [the substitution of the Italian vernacular for Latin, the printing of the text rather than its original manuscript form, and the encomium of a contemporary woman] assisted in re-proposing the De mulieribus claris to significantly new audiences in early sixteenth-century Italy. The apparition of Boccaccio aptly personifies the ambiguous status of his work on women, and its formal ‘restoration’ to the Italian publishing and cultural scenes in 1506. All previous editions of the Latin text had been produced outside Italy; it would seem that the work had been virtually ignored by the foremost, ‘mainstream’ Italian humanists in the major centres. Yet the

Notes to page 44

183

present volume demonstrates that the De mulieribus claris had been taken up by other writers, elsewhere in north Italy, as a work of intellectual worth, and perhaps also of entertainment. Indeed, Boccaccio’s presence in the 1506 preface confidently acknowledged a return to relevance for the De mulieribus claris. This return was in effect the culmination of a discursive preoccupation with the work over the preceding twenty-five years in Italy.” 11 According to William J. Kennedy in Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 34: “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 spiritualizing redaction of the Rime sparse by the Franciscan friar Girolamo Malipiero, Il Petrarch spirituale, first published in 1536, underwent six popular editions (1545–87) and it initiated a flood of imitations, including Stefano Colonna’s I sonetti, le canzoni, et i triomphi di M. Laura in risposta di M. Francesco Petrarch (1552). This remarkably derivative sequence rewrote Petrarch’s amatory complaints as a series of exemplary replies by the virtuous Laura.” Citations from Malipiero’s edition are from the 1536 Marcolino da Forlì edition held in the Special Collections Library of Penn State University. I have selectively modernized the spelling of Malipiero’s text. I came across Simone Turbeville’s partial translation of Malipiero’s work – “Prefatory Dialogue and Certain Sonnets from Girolamo Malipiero’s Il Petrarcha spirituale,” Allegorica 1.1 (1976): 126–65 – after I had completed my own English translations of the passages included in this study. For more on Colonna’s work and subsequent imitations, see Amadeo Quondam, Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del classicismo (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1991), and Roberto Fedi, “Soli e pensosi: Censura, parodia, fortuna di un sonetto petrarchesco (RVF XXXV),” Lingua e stile 26.3 (September 1991): 465–81. Further references to Quondam appear in the text. 12 Quondam proposes various possibilities in the title of the fourth part of Il naso di Laura, “Riscrittura, citazione e parodia: Il Petrarca spirituale di Girolamo Malipiero,” 203–62 – that is, a rewriting, citation, or parody of Petrarch’s canzoniere. Quondam meticulously reconstructs the context of Venetian publishing in the 1530s and 1540s, suggesting quite convincingly that Malipiero’s ideological adversary is Pietro Bembo and by extension the multitude of self-declared Petrarchisti Bembo had encouraged by his model of lyric poetry. Building on Quondam’s contribution, Fedi calls Malipiero’s project, as well as works by Stefano Colonna and Pellegra Bongiovanni, three hypertexts “tre ipertesti” (466), showing the likes of

184

13

14

15

16 17

Notes to pages 45–8

“dipendenza e, stilisticamente di parodia” (dependence and stylistically [a relationship of] parody) with respect to the Petrarchan model. In this respect, Malipiero’s project anticipates other moralizing rewritings of Petrarch’s poetry by Gian Giacomo Salvatorino, who produced a Thesauro de sacra scrittura sopra Rime del Petrarcha (Thesaurus on Sacred Scripture on the Poetry of Petrarch), and by Gian Agostino Caccia (Petrarca spirituale, published circa 1550). Other authors’ texts endured pious censoring attempts as well, including Boccaccio’s Decameron by Francesco Dionigi da Fano in 1594, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso by Vincenzo Marini in 1596, and Tasso’s Rime amorose by Crisippo Selva in 1611. On this procedure, see also the various contributions to Scritture di scritture: Testi, generi, modelli nel Rinascimento, ed. Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Michel Plaisance (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987). Original and English translation appear in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 35–6. According to Fedi: “Girolamo Malipiero, proprio a cavallo del 1535 e proprio nella imprenditoriale Venezia degli industriali-tipografi, coglie subito la duplice natura (construens e destruens insieme, potremmo dire) del petrarchismo alla maniera bembiana scovandone l’interno dispositivo di autodistruzione, essendo l’imitatio di per sé una pratica tendente certo a illuminare, ma insieme ad annullare, – quasi per un processo di metabolismo – l’oggetto della sua attenzione” (470; Right around 1535 [the same year in which Bembo’s second edition of his Rime appeared in Venice] and in precisely the same Venetian industrial typographical publishing houses, Girolamo Malipiero seizes on the double nature (construens and destruens together, we could say) of Petrarchism in the Bembian manner, by delving into its internal disposition moving toward self-destruction, given that imitatio in and of itself is a practice that tends certainly toward illuminating, but at the same time toward destroying – almost as if by a process of metabolism – the object of its attention.) This setting is the one depicted by the woodcut on the title page of Il Petrarcha spirituale. The response by Petrarch’s spirit echoes, of course, the words of Virgil’s shade to Dante the pilgrim in Inf. 1.65–7 in the English translation by Durling: “‘Miserere di me,’ gridai a lui,/‘qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!’/Rispuosemi: ‘Non omo, omo già fui …’” (“‘Miserere/– on me,’ I cried to him, ‘whatever you may be,/whether shade or true man!’/He replied: ‘Not a man, I was formerly a man …’”).

Notes to pages 50–1

185

18 “Petrarch”’s remark to Malipiero echoes “Virgil”’s counsel to Dante the pilgrim at the sight of those souls relegated to the vestibule of Hell (Inf. 3.51), and the context of the allusion may have been particularly significant for Malipiero. In Dante’s poem, this realm is reserved for the pusillanimous, those human beings who did not exercise the divine gift of free will to choose good or evil, but instead merely existed during their lifetimes in a state beneath their dignity and intelligence. These souls appropriately remain without identities or individual voices in Dante’s Commedia. In Malipiero’s dialogue, the throng of fools who prefer to read filthy, evil, or wicked things – while this is not an act that, properly speaking, could be defined as pusillanimous – are certainly beneath the dignity of the spiritual decorum to which Malipiero aims. 19 Quondam continues with a bit more melodramatic characterization: “La vittima non può che affidarsi al proprio carnefice, non può che appellarsi all”ufficio di pietà’ del ‘vivente’ Malipiero, sollecitare – ‘a mia istanza’ – la necessaria emendazione” (209; The victim cannot but throw himself on the mercy of his torturer, or do otherwise than call on the “office of pity” of the “living” Malipiero, soliciting – “at my insistence” – the necessary emendation). 20 According to Quondam: “Malipiero deve sgombrare il campo da queste interpretazioni allegoriche del Canzoniere, proprio perché attraversano – orientandola funzionalmente – l’ambiguità del testo e dei suoi significati, e rendono inutile ogni operazione di emendamento … e di riscrittura, parziale o totale che sia” (207; Malipiero must get rid of these allegorical interpretations of the Canzoniere, precisely because they jump the ambiguity of the text and its meanings – functionally reorienting it – and rendering useless any measures to emend it … or rewrite it in part or entirely). I believe that Quondam is correct when he says that Malipiero’s introduction betrays the underlying motivation of the Dialogo. “La finzione del Dialogo qui si scioglie: non per soccorrere l’anima di Petrarca condannata all’esilio del purgatorio donec corrigatur la sua opera, ma per dare pietoso aiuto a questi tanti ‘giovani inesperti’, in balia di ‘illecebrose sirene’, per proporre loro un esempio efficace e concreto, Malipiero si è assunto la fatica di riscrivere per intero, verso dopo verso, Petrarca” (223; The fiction of the Dialogue falls apart here: not in order to succour the soul of Petrarch condemned to purgatorial exile must his work be corrected, but in order to give pious aid to so many of these “young inexperienced ones” in the throes of “lecherous sirens” by offering them an efficacious and concrete example has Malipiero assumed the task of entirely rewriting Petrarch, verse by verse). Quondam went on to muse: “questo Petrarca

186

Notes to page 51

spirituale del 1536 mi sembra poter assumere i contorni di una maschera. Nel troppo che ostenta c’è qualcosa o qualcuno che si nasconde” (224; this Petrarca spirituale of 1536 seems to me to take on the outlines of a mask. In the excesses that it flouts, there is something or somebody who is hiding), and he then examines the motivations of the publisher Marcolini and Aretino, ultimately finding that there may be a “doppio effetto di parodia e di sberleffo” (225; a double effect of parody and mockery) on their part, as if they intended to “‘far le fica’ a Petrarca e al petrarchismo con questo Petrarca spirituale” (225; “give the fig” to Petrarch and Petrarchism with this Petrarca spirituale). 21 Fedi suggests another intriguing possibility: “Malipiero agisce contro il codice petrarchesco-bembiano, nel momento in cui accetta non di misurarsi col modello bensì di parodiarne in senso spirituale la traccia stilistica. Se, infatti, rispondere ‘per le rime’ significa l’accettazione della sopravvivenza dell’ipotesto dei Rerum vulgarium, la sua traslitterazione moraleggiante ne crea un raddoppio che sull’originale si distende fino a farlo scomparire (forse non per caso il Petrarcha spirituale modifica la struttura interna del modello, separando i sonetti dagli altri metri e addirittura con una distinta prefazione: ultima manovra di uno ‘smontaggio’ o de-semantizzazione ormai evidente anche nella dispositio)” (471; Malipiero acts against the Petrarchan-Bembian code when he agrees not to measure himself against the model but rather to parody its stylistic tracks in a spiritual sense. If, in fact, responding “by means of the same rhymes” [that is, poking fun at it line by line] signifies accepting the survival of the hypotext of the Rerum vulgarium, his moralizing transliteration creates a double of the original covering it to the point of making it disappear (perhaps not by chance Petrarcha spirituale modifies the internal structure of the model, separating the sonnets from the lyrics in other metres and even a separate preface: the ultimate manoeuvre of a disassembly or de-semantization by now evident even in its dispositio)). It should be remembered, however, that Malipiero was certainly not the first editor to attempt to reorder or to rearrange Petrarch’s lyric poems. In 1528, for instance, Alessandro Vellutello produced an edition of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta that was divided into three sections. In addition to the two sections on love sonnets and canzoni, there was a third section on occasional poems, including those with overtly political themes. 22 Teodolinda Barolini’s outstanding contribution, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, 33–62, traces many more subtle motivations for Petrarch’s ordering of the poems, all very different from Malipiero’s reorganization

Notes to pages 52–6

23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

187

and “reformation” of them. Some scholars “read the collection as dramatizing an achieved conversion. Others, including the author of this essay, do not, for instability is at the core of this work: thematically, psychologically, and as we shall see, textually and materially.” Quondam hypothesized to a similar conclusion if Malipiero had written his objections in a different genre: “Se Malipiero si fosse limitato a scrivere e dare alle stampe questo suo trattatello in forma di predica, nessuno certamente se ne sarebbe accorto: il punto di forza, ora e poi, è nel vettore impiegato, nell’osare trasformare in campione di questa nuova poesia sacra il campione assoluto di tutta quanta la poesia profana” (215; If Malipiero had limited himself to writing and publishing this little treatise in the form of a sermon, surely nobody would have noticed: the point to emphasize, now and again, is in the vector employed, in daring to transform the absolute champion of all of secular poetry into the champion of this new sacred poetry). Cited from Giovanni degli Agostini, Notizie istorico-critiche intorno La Vita, e le Opere degli Scrittori Viniziani (Venice: Simone Occhi, 1754), 441. Further references appear in the text. Nicolo Franco’s letter to “Petrarch” is titled “Pistola di M. Nicolo Franco ne la quale scrive al Petrarca” and is among his Pistole vulgari (Venice: Antonio Gardane, 1539). Citations are from this edition. Charles Davis, “Two Early Statements about Michelangelo Not in Steinmann-Wittkower,” FONTES 42: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ artdok/volltexte/2009/840/, 4. Roberto Leporatti has recently prepared a critical edition of this work published in Interpres 27 (2008): 144–298. The passage appears on 3v in Girolamo Benivieni, Commento sopra a più sue canzone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza Divina (Florence: Antonio Tubini, Lorenzo de Alopo Veneziano and Andrea Ghirlandi, 1500). In my citations here I have selectively modernized Benivieni’s spelling. By this end I understand: converting lascivious-minded Petrarchisti to more edifying reading and writing of lyric poetry, not aiding the spirit of Petrarch to find blessed eternal rest, as Malipiero claimed. Another consideration might be the genealogy of the nature of the spirit itself. Malipiero’s vision of “Petrarch” resembles the classical pagan depiction of umbrae, spirits forced to hover around their tombs until issues concerning their previous life or the circumstances of their death are properly resolved, more than a representation of a Christian soul. After all, Christians believed that after death souls went to an otherworldly place – hell, purgatory, or heaven – and certainly did not remain near their burial places.

188

Notes to pages 58–61

31 Barolini, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time,” 36, cites from Augustine’s Confessions 8.9, and the emphasis is hers. She continues along the same lines on p. 39: “Petrarch was well aware of the gravity of conversion; he wrote about it in the Secretum. ‘Time in its metaphysical multiplicity can lead to moral confusion: in the Secretum Augustinus cautions Franciscus not to delay his conversion, not to be deceived by the divisibility of time.’” 32 According to Giuliano Tanturli in his entry dedicated to Manetti in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1925– ). 33 I cite passages from Gaetano Milanesi’s edition of the Operette istoriche edite ed inedite di Antonio Manetti (Florence: Successors Le Monnier, 1887). 34 According to Milanesi in the Preface of his 1887 edition, Manetti had close ties of friendship to Ficino, “che nel Dialogo Dell’Amore, introdusse interlocutori il Manetti e Bernardo del Nero, chiamandoli suoi amicissimi; e a loro dedicò il volgarizzamento del libro De Monarchia di Dante” (xviii–xix; who in the dialogue On Love introduced Manetti and Bernardo del Nero as his interlocutors, calling them his closest friends; and to them Ficino dedicated the vernacular Italian translation of Dante’s De monarchia). According to Tanturli in “Proposta e risposta: La prolusione petrarchesca del Landino e il codice cavalcantiano di Antonio Manetti,” Rinascimento 32 (1992): 220: “Mi sembra probabile che si riferisse alla traduzione della Monarchia di Dante dal Ficino dedicata a lui e a Bernardo del Nero il 21 marzo 1468; anzi … non vedo a che cos’altro si sarebbe potuto riferire” (It seems probable to me that he refers to Ficino’s translation of Dante’s De monarchia, dedicated to him and Bernardo del Nero on 21 March 1468, actually … I cannot see to what else he could be referring). It should be noted, however, that according to Tanturli, Ficino did not translate Plato’s Libro dell’amore (Book on Love) until “dopo il 1469” (after 1469), that is, after Manetti wrote the Notizia. 35 Maria Luisa Ardizzone situates Manetti’s dedication to Giovanni Cavalcanti in the broader context of Cavalcanti studies: “Del Garbo’s commentary (which Boccaccio would later copy by hand) enlarges Cavalcanti’s fame. This text, which probably influenced the portrait of Guido we see in the Decameron, opens a new perspective on him. From this point onward, Guido’s poetry is ascribed more to a tradition of science than to one of literature. This perspective is no doubt responsible for the relevant role that will be given to Cavalcanti in the Florentine Platonic school. In the age of humanism, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, the biographer of Brunelleschi, organizes the first ‘historical codex’ ([Domenico] De Robertis) of Guido’s work and dedicates it to Giovanni Cavalcanti, a member of Guido’s family and a

Notes to pages 62–5

189

friend of Marsilio Ficino. Manetti includes, along with Guido’s texts, the two commentaries on Donna me prega. The exegesis that Ficino reserves for Donna me prega in his commentary on Plato’s Convivium is one tile of the composite mosaic that, during the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, recreates the legend of Cavalcanti. Poliziano’s dedicatory letter to Raccolta Aragonese, which emphasizes the quality of Cavalcanti’s poetry, and the acknowledgment to Cavalcanti in the Giuntina edition (1527), which devotes an entire volume to him, are also influential for the sixteenthcentury editions and studies of Guido and his Donna me prega.” Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 4. I will return to examine aspects of both the Raccolta aragonese and the 1481 Florentine edition of Dante’s Commedia in the following chapter. 36 Cited from Tanturli’s entry on Manetti in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Moreover, as Tanturli notes in “Proposta e risposta,” 223, Manetti insists that “Il peso (gravità), l’oggettivo valore (verità) del contenuto si impone attraverso e a dispetto di qualsiasi forma” (The weight (gravity), the objective value of the content (truth) shows itself by means of and despite any particular form), as opposed to Landino’s argument that writers who were not elegant in their work were unlikely to express truth in their writings either. 37 In this regard, it is perhaps not coincidental that Manetti’s language echoes Dante’s in Paradiso 25.118–29, when, faced with the blindingly bright figure of John the Apostle, Dante wrinkles his brow in an attempt to determine the truth of what has been said about John’s ascension in both body and soul to heaven. Manetti’s experience of this version of a “transfiguration,” for all of its representation of a blessed soul in a luminous body speaking to a living witness, is a comparatively secular vision. 38 Guido Cavalcanti’s in-laws were examples of the potential for even the deceased to be found heretical: “Farinata’s family (the Uberti) was explicitly excluded from later amnesties (he had died in 1264), and in 1283 he and his wife (both posthumously charged with heresy) were excommunicated. Their bodies were disinterred and burned, and the possessions of their heirs confiscated.” Cited from http://danteworlds. laits.utexas.edu/circle6.html on 7 January 2013. For an excellent perspective on Cavalcanti’s reputation among his contemporaries and the controversy surrounding his beliefs, see Zygmunt G. Barański, “Guido Cavalcanti and His First Readers,” in Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Fiesole: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003), 149–75. Barański convincingly rejects Ernesto G. Parodi’s arguments in “La miscredenza di Guido Cavalcanti e una fonte del Boccaccio,” Bolletino della

190

Notes to pages 65–70

Società Dantesca 22 (1915): 40 on Cavalcanti’s association with Averroism and Epicureanism: “like any human being, he has flaws (the listing of weaknesses was a commonplace of the vitae, though, as in Guido’s case, they were never allowed to submerge the ‘authority’s’ virtues). He was irascible and sdegnoso (that key epithet), and there were occasional hints of homosexuality, of avarice and materialism, and of arrogance. Of what there is no trace, other than in Dante, and after him in Boccaccio and his imitators, is any suggestion of intellectual unorthodoxy, never mind of Epicureanism” (167). He concludes, “Durling’s point is well made, especially in the light of Guido’s burial in holy ground in Santa Reparata, which confirms that his fellow-citizens did not deem him a heretic or an unbeliever.” Barański is referring to Robert M. Durling, “Boccaccio on Interpretation: Guido’s Escape (Decameron VI.9),” in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 1983), 297. See also Guido Favati, Inchiesta sul dolce stil nuovo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1975), 193. 39 More precisely, Epimenides in his Cretica was believed to have written without self-reflexive irony the following verses concerning Zeus’s immortality: “They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one/The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!/But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever.” Today these words serve as an illustration of contingency, rather than the paradox of insolubilia or sophism that it was called in previous ages. 40 This and subsequent citations from the Decameron are from Vittore Branca’s edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1987 [1980]), 753–8, and the English translation by Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 401–3. 41 The critical bibliography on this subject is vast. Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), remains a good point of departure for the way in which the contributors synthesize theories from Dante to Giambattista Vico, as well as from T.S. Eliot, Erich Auerbach, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and many others in their focus on the literature of this period. 2. Divining Dante: Scandals of His Corpus and Corpse 1 Todd Boli noted, “Boccaccio’s strategy of defending Dante’s work and promoting it in the emerging humanist environment is twofold: let Dante’s poetry speak for itself and add his own voice to speak on Dante’s behalf …

Notes to page 70

191

To capture humanist approval, the Trattatello subjects Dante’s character and works to revealing deformations. It contradicts what Dante says in the Convivio about not wanting to accuse the Vita Nuova of undue passion and claims instead that Dante d’avere questo libretto fatto negli anni più maturi si vergognasse molto (‘was ashamed in his more mature years of having made this little book,’ 175) – precisely as Petrarch in his maturity affected embarrassment at having written the amorous ‘trifles’ of his vernacular canzoniere. The Trattatello contradicts what Dante says in the Vita Nuova about the moral improvement he experienced through his love of Beatrice and claims instead that tanto amore e sì lungo (‘so great and long a love’) impeded Dante’s cibo, i sonni e ciascuna altra quiete (‘diet, sleep, and every other quiet’) and constituted a harsh avversario agli sacri studii e allo ’ngegno (‘adversary to sacred study and to his genius,’ 38) – precisely as Petrarch claimed his love for Laura caused him to lose appetite and sleep and kept him from completing important poetic works. Perhaps the most significant of all the Trattatello’s deformations is its recasting of the Commedia’s divine mission in more earthly terms. For the Trattatello, the Commedia’s purpose is not so much ‘to lead those living in misery to blessedness’ (Epistle to Cangrande, 21) as to secure earthly glory for the poet.” From “Boccaccio, Giovanni,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 2000), 112. 2 On Boccaccio’s Trattatello and its two subsequent redactions, see Pier Giorgio Ricci, “Le tre redazioni del Trattatello in laude di Dante,” Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 197–214. 3 Although John Ahern does not treat explicitly Boccaccio’s account, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, of the way the final cantos of Dante’s Paradiso were found after Dante’s death, he does note the following in his essay “What Did the First Copies of the Comedy Look Like?” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 6: “When Dante died during the second year of Petrarch’s stay in Bologna, so far as we know, no complete single-volume manuscript of the Comedy was in circulation. In Ravenna his patron Guido da Polenta probably possessed a copy, as did members of his circle there: Dino Perini, a doctor in correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio in Bologna, Piero Giardini, a notary active between 1311 and 1348 who, according to Boccaccio, had been Dante’s disciple and also served as Boccaccio’s informant (Trattatello 1974, 186), and Guido Vacchetta, who knew Giovanni del Virgilio. According to Boccaccio (Trattatello, first redaction 185–89; second redaction, 121–27), Dante’s son Iacopo, then in his twenties, working from a holograph, prepared the first one-volume

192

4

5 6 7

8

Notes to pages 70–3

Comedy for Guido da Polenta (Francesca’s uncle). In an accompanying sonnet, ‘Acciò che le bellezze, signor mio,’ probably sent on April 1, when Guido assumed his duties as Capitano del Popolo in Bologna, Iacopo asked Guido to correct the text (‘I’m sending it so that you might correct it’), a request that suggests that Guido knew the work, possessed authoritative copies, and would circulate the corrected version (Iacopo Alighieri 1990, 7). Iacopo appears also to have sent Guido his own Latin commentary, the Chiose, as well as a short verse summary, or capitolo.” Unless otherwise indicated, for the Trattatello I cite from the first redaction in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 3 (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 437–96 (this passage appears on page 484). The English translation of the Trattatello is by James Robinson Smith, The Earliest Lives of Dante Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1901]), 9–78 (here page 65). For the subsequent redactions of this episode, the variants of which do not substantively alter the narrative, please see pages 527–8 of Branca’s abovecited volume. Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Ravenna e le sue grandi memorie: Ravenna Felix (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1912), 149. Boccaccio, The Life of Dante (Trattatello in Laude di Dante), trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990), 94. Giuseppe Billanovich, “La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio dalla lettera di Ilaro al Trattaello in laude di Dante,” Studi Danteschi 28 (1949): 113: “Perché il dettatore, oltre le biografie dei classici, aveva estratto anche dall’arca, sempre pronta, dei testi sacri come modelli naturali per questi racconti le leggende dei santi, è ora facile la discesa: Dante compare in visione miracolosa verso il mattutino al figlio dormiente e gli rivela il nascondiglio riposto dove ha lasciato i tredici canti. E quindi quei canti sono ricuperati, e inviati a Cangrande. Con questa invenzione il novelliere benevolo allunga in terra la mano di Dio …” (Since the scribe had extracted from his ever-ready quiver of sacred texts the legends of the saints, in addition to biographies of the classics, as natural models for these stories, the connection is easy to make now: Dante appears in a wondrous vision around dawn to his sleeping son and reveals to him the hiding place where he left the thirteen cantos. And thus those cantos are recovered and sent to Cangrande. With this invention the well-intentioned storyteller extends the hand of God to earth … ). Todd Boli summarized this debate in “Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, or Dante Resartus,” Renaissance Quarterly 41.3 (Autumn 1988): 389–412. For more recent interventions, see Saverio Bellomo, “Il sorriso

Notes to pages 73–7

9 10

11

12

13 14

193

di Ilaro,” Studi sul Boccaccio 32 (2004): 201–35; Simon A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Giuseppe Indizio, “L’episola di Ilaro: Un contributo sistemico,” Studi danteschi 71 (2006): 191–263; Emilio Pasquini, “Riflessioni sulla genesi della Commedia,” in Dante e la fabbrica della Commedia, ed. Alfredo Cottignoli et al., Atti del convegno internazionale, Ravenna, 14–16 September 2006 (Ravenna: Longo, 2008), 15–36; and Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as “Dantista” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Giorgio Padoan, Il lungo cammino del “poema sacro” (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 120. Bruni, Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. Paolo Viti (Turin: UTET, 1996), 537–8. The English translation is by Smith, The Earliest Lives of Dante, 81. Alessandro Vellutello, in his 1544 Venetian edition of the Commedia, will echo Bruni’s characterization of Boccaccio’s Trattatello when he states, “Il primo che scrisse la vita di Dante fu Giovanni Boccaccio da Certaldo, quasi in tragico stile, o vogliamolo dire tutta piena d’amorosi sospiri e lacrime” (cited from Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo decimosesto, ed. Angelo Solerti [Milan: Vallardi, 1904], 202; The first to write a biography of Dante was Giovanni Boccaccio from Certaldo, almost in a tragic style, or we might say full of amorous sighs and tears). Among other early Dante commentators to mention Jacopo’s dream as an explanation for finding the final cantos of Dante’s Paradiso after his death are Filippo Villani, Cristoforo Landino, and Alessandro Zilioli, though none of these scholars offers new details or a critical consideration of the issue. Please see Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, ed. Solerti, 90, 190, and 236 respectively. According to Stefano U. Baldassarri in his introduction to Giannozzo Manetti’s Biographical Writings, ed. and trans. Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), xiii. I cite here and following from Baldassarri and Bagemihl’s above-cited Latin-English facing-page edition (note 12). Jason M. Houston came to a similar conclusion in Building a Monument to Dante, 89: “During the 1350s, Boccaccio was an important player in a Florence that was in a political quagmire similar to the one that had so troubled Dante’s day. Florence, fresh from the disaster of Walter, Duke of Athens, struggled to maintain its political independence from the growing shadow of Viscontian tyranny spreading down from the north. The city itself suffered from catastrophic internal divisions similar to those that had forced Dante into exile. In Dante, Boccaccio found a potentially powerful

194

15

16

17

18

19

Notes to pages 77–80

voice from beyond the grave that might serve as an authority that would rein in the tyrannical abuses of the magnates and drive the city toward a more virtuous, and therefore stable, existence. For this reason, in the Trattatello Boccaccio speaks in clear and literal terms about Florence’s need to honour Dante with a monument rather than to continue to treat him as a political exile.” This passage is cited from Branca’s edition of Tutte le opere of Boccaccio, vol. 5.1 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), 724 (emphasis mine). Edward Hutton in Giovanni Boccaccio: A Biographical Study (London: John Lane, 1910) and Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio (New York: Viking Press, 1981) both provide excellent studies and translations of the passage in English. Here and in the pages that follow I use Bergin’s translation (278). Andrew Butterfield, “Monument and Memory in Early Renaissance Florence,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 135. On death and modes of commemoration in the Italian Renaissance, see also the studies by Stephen Murphy, Allison Wright, and Alberto Tenenti. I recognize the difficulties in arguing Florentine versus non-Florentine positions concerning Dante’s remains. For one, not even citizens of the same city always agree on which course of action to take or on which famous figures to honour. Moreover, issues of citizenship, including the naturalization of foreigners and the reintegration of previously exiled Florentines, were extremely complicated. For instance, although Bruni was born in Arezzo, he considered himself Florentine well before his citizenship was made official in 1416. Meanwhile, Filelfo, though he held for a period the Florentine cattedra to lecture on Dante, he remained an outsider, born in Tolentino in the Marche region of Italy, and referred to Florence as “la città vostra” (your city, my emphasis) in his orations. See, for instance, the one delivered on 29 June 1432 (cited in Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, 102). Thus I am attempting to distinguish between their very different perspectives in seeing Bruni as a Florentine seeking the repatriation of Dante’s bones for the greater glory of his city, but seeing Filelfo as a non-Florentine outsider trying to shame Florentines into showing more honour toward Dante. Riccardo Fubini included the Provision of the Signoria, which was dated 23 December 1396, as an appendix in his volume L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici. Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 101–3. The original Latin is cited from Paolo Viti’s Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: Studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 78–9. The English

Notes to pages 81–4

20

21 22

23

24

25 26

195

translation is by Gilson in Dante and Renaissance Florence, 113. Further references to Gilson’s translation are in the text. According to Filelfo biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci in Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco, 2 vols. (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970–6), 2:54: “ebbe tutti i figliuoli degli uomini da bene alle sua letioni. Aveva del continovo dugento iscolari o più” (he attracted all the sons of the well-to-do to his lessons. He always had two hundred students or more). From Paolo Viti’s entry on Filelfo in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 47 (1997). This excerpt appears in Gilson’s Dante and Renaissance Florence, 102, and the English translation is his. For the rest of the oration and others by Filelfo, see “Prose e poesie volgari,” ed. Giovanni Benaducci, in Atti e memorie della Reale Deputazione di storia patria per le provincie delle Marche 5 (1901): xli–262. On Cristoforo Landino’s edition of the Commedia, including the edition’s collaborators, see his Scritti critici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini in two volumes (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), from which citations here are taken, and Cardini’s monograph La critica del Landino (Florence: Sansoni, 1973); Arthur Field, “Cristoforo Landino’s First Lectures on Dante,” Renaissance Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1986): 16–48; and Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). For broader questions of Dante’s Renaissance reception, see Michele Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI (Pisa: Tipografia T. Nistri E.C., 1890); Eugenio Garin, “Dante nel Rinascimento,” Rinascimento 7 n.s. (1967): 3–28; Aldo Vallone, L’interpretazione di Dante nel Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1969); and Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). On Botticelli’s illustrations for the Commedia, please see Peter Dreyer, “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481,’” Print Quarterly 1 (1984): 111–15; and Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, ed. HeinThomas Schulze Altcappenberg (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2000). Cardini, La critica del Landino, 99. Florentine poet Bernardo Bellincioni (1452–1492) was among those who encouraged Cristoforo Landino to re-edit Dante’s masterpiece. After receiving from Landino an old edition of the Commedia, Bellincioni acknowledged receipt with a sonnet in the voice of Dante, which begins: “Non guarderete al mio rotto mantello,/Chè spesso quel di fuor par che ci inganni:/Vedete il rusignuol co’ bigi panni/Cantando sempre vince ogni altro uccello …” (You will not look at my torn cloak,/since often what appears on the outside can fool us:/Witness the nightingale in its gray clothes/always triumphing in song over every other bird … ). The original

196

27

28

29 30

Notes to pages 84–5

appears in Carlo del Balzo’s anthology, Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, 14 vols. (Rome: Forzani E.C., 1893–1908), 4.148–9. I see no reason not to accept del Balzo’s hypothesis: “Evidentemente questo sonetto, che berteggia le strampalate e strane interpretazioni del commentatori della Divina Commedia, dovè essere scritto prima dell’anno 1481 in cui vide la luce il Commento del Landino con i disegni di Sandro Botticelli, che allora fu un vero avvenimento letterario ed artistico. Di certo se fosse stato scritto dopo, Bernardo non avrebbe mancato di eccettuare dal suo biasimo il Commento del suo amico. Nondimeno, io opino, considerando che il Landino non avrebbe fatto dono di quel Dante antico pieno di commenti, se non avesse dato fine al suo lavoro, che questo sonetto fu scritto poco innanzi il 1481, cioè tra il 1479 e 1480” (Evidently this sonnet, which targets the peculiar and strange interpretations by commentators of the Divina commedia, must have been written before 1481, the year that the Commento by Landino with the illustrations by Sandro Botticelli came to light, which then was a true literary and artistic event. Of course if it had been written later, Bernardo would not have neglected to bracket from his critique the Commento by his friend. Nevertheless, I believe that this sonnet was written a bit before 1481, that is between 1479 and 1480, since Landino would not have sent a gift of that ancient Dante full of comments if he had finished his own work). Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, 1.139. Mandred Lentzen chronicles the development of Landino’s patriotic writings vis-à-vis Lorenzo’s political ambitions in “Le lodi di Firenze di Cristoforo Landino,” Romanische Forschungen 97.1 (1985): 36–46. Ravenna was under Venetian rule at the time. The letter appears in Scrittura di Artisti Italiani del secolo XIV al SVII, riprodotta colla Fotografia da Carlo Pini, ed illustrate da Gaetano Milanesi 69.1 (Florence, 1870), which was republished in 1874 by Archivio Storico Italiano series 3, vol. 19.1. Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, 1.129. In fact, Bernardo Bembo emphasizes in the epitaph that he wrote for the tomb that Dante’s remains have waited far too long for honourable restoration: “Exigua tumuli Dantes hic sorte jacebas Squallenti nulli cognite pene situ. At nunc marmoreo subnixus conderis arcu Omnibus et cultu splendidiore nites Nimirum Bembus musis incensus ethruscis Hoc tibi quem in primis hoc coluere dedit. Ann Sal. mcccclxxxiii. vi. Kal. Jvn. Bernardus Bemb. Praet. aere suo Posuit” (Here, Dante, in the squalor of your burial you have lain, in this place hardly known to anybody. But now you rest under a marble vault, and you shine in brightest splendour, for Bembo, inspired by the Tuscan Muses, to you, their favourite, offered this tribute. In the year of

Notes to page 85

197

salvation 1483, the sixth day before the first of June, Bernardo Bembo, chief magistrate, erected this at his own expense). See Corrado Ricci, Il sepolcro e le ossa di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 16; and Catherine Mary Phillimore, Dante at Ravenna (London: Elliot Stock, 1898), 192. 31 See Cardini, La critica del Landino, 97. On the life and accomplishments of Bernardo Bembo, see Nella Giannetto, Bernardo Bembo umanista e politico veneziano (Florence: Olschki, 1985). E.G. Ledos republished the letter in “Lettre inédite de Cristoforo Landino à Bernardo Bembo,” Bibliotheque L’École de Chartes 54 (1893): 721–4. 32 Carlo Dionisotti notes in “Dante nel Quattrocento,” in Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi, ed. Società Dantesca Italiana e dell’Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1965), 371: “Già, come si è visto, l’edizione veneziana del 1477 aveva messo in primo piano la vita di Dante del Boccaccio, estendendone il titolo, che anche fungeva da titolo dell’intero volume, al sommario del primo capitolo, in cui il Boccaccio ‘tocca la sententia de Solone, la quale è mal seguita per gli Fiorentini.’ Ma nell’edizione Milanese del 1478 faceva spicco in buon latino un passo che a Firenze non poteva esser lasciato senza risposta. Giustificando la sua scelta del commento di Jacopo della Lana, il Nidobeato aveva scritto che gli otto commenti a lui noti potevano considerarsi all’incirca equivalenti per ‘ingenio, elloquio, doctrina, diligentia,’ ma che quello di Jacopo della Lana ‘materna eadem et bononiensi lingua superare est visus, cum sit illa urbs ita in umbilico Italie posita ut assiduo commertio non tersa solum vocabula sed provintiis omnibus etiam communia habeat, nec minore gratia dignitateque sit in Italia bononiensis sermo quam laconicus olim in Grecia fuit’” (As has been seen, the Venetian 1477 edition already foregrounded Boccaccio’s Trattatello, extending its title, which also served as the title of the whole volume, to the summary of the first chapter in which Boccaccio “touches on Solon’s judgment that is poorly followed by the Florentines.” But in the 1478 Milanese edition, a passage in nice Latin stood out – a passage that could not be left unanswered in Florence. Justifying his choice of the commentary by Jacopo della Lana, Nidobeato had written that the eight commentaries known to him could be considered more or less equal in “cleverness, eloquence, learning, and diligence,” but the one by Jacopo della Lana seemed “superior because of his mother tongue, the same as that of Bologna. For that city is positioned in the centre of Italy in such a way that through its continual trade it has a vocabulary that is not only precise but also common to all provinces, and the language of the Bolognese is held in no less esteem and authority

198

33 34

35

36

37

Notes to pages 85–7

in Italy than that of Sparta once was in Greece”). According to Emilio Bigi, Forme e significati nella “Divina Commedia” (Bologna: Cappelli, 1981), 161: “Il significato del mito è trasparente: per merito del commento del Landino, Dante è stato onorevolmente riaccolto nella sua città … la Firenze, s’intende, medicea … come nell’epistola del Ficino, anche nel commento del Landino, l’aspetto più caratteristico e centrale è da indicare nella compresenza di quei due temi: rivendicazione di Dante come elemento del prestigio politico-letterario della Firenze medicea, e insieme insistenza sul carattere contemplativo, anzi platonico e neoplatonico, della sua poesia” (The meaning of the myth is clear: thanks to Landino’s commentary, Dante was honourably brought back to his city … the Florence, one understands, of the Medici … and in the letter by Ficino, so also in Landino’s commentary, the most characteristic and central aspect is notable in the presence together of two terms: Dante’s revindication as an element of the political-literary prestige of Medicean Flroence, and the insistence on the contemplative – specifically Platonic and Neoplatonic – character of his poetry). Cardini in La critica del Landino, 97, rightly emphasizes the fact that this was also a hasty mobilization, taking just a little over a year in 1480–1. Ficino’s Latin preface is in Landino, Scritti critici e teorici. The translations are from Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art, ed. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 180. Further references are in the text. Rachel Jacoff analyses how the illuminations of Inc 6120A held by Harvard University’s Houghton Library also contributed to its function as civic promotional propaganda. See “Charles Eliot Norton’s ‘Medicean Dante,’” Harvard Literary Bulletin n.s. 5:3 (1994): 45–52. The 1506 edition of Dante’s Divina commedia is the only Florentine edition of the complete work printed between 1481 and 1595. In fact, Benivieni’s edition was widely considered the third most important sixteenth-century edition of the entire Divina Commedia after the 1595 Crusca Academy project and Pietro Bembo’s Venetian edition, published by Aldus Manutius in 1502. The 1572 edition and commentary by Vincenzo Buonanni contained only the Inferno. The rhyme scheme of the “Cantico” is only approximate in places, such as at lines 47, 49, and 51: vediensi-sensi-sospinsi. Benivieni also falls out of the rhyme at roughly the halfway point: lines 101–2 display rima baciata in secocieco. The text of the “Cantico” appears in the fourth volume of Carlo del Balzo’s anthology, Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri. It should also be noted that Benivieni on occasion referred to the Commedia itself

Notes to pages 87–90

38

39

40 41

42 43

199

as the Cantica, that is, “the Canticle,” as he did in the Dialogo di Antonio di Tuccio Manetti cittadino fiorentino circa al sito, forma et misure dello Inferno in the context of a list of Dante’s works that Benivieni had read: “Ho visto anchora in latino [la Monarchia], più sue egloge ad diverse persone, della sua Cantica, o vero Commedia, in versi heroici” (cited from the edition by Nicola Zingarelli [Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1897], 53; I saw another [work] in Latin [the De Monarchia], some eclogues to various people, and his Canticle, that is his Comedy, in heroic verse). For Benivieni, the feminine form, cantica, appears to refer to the entire collection of the masculine “cantici,” or cantos. The name of Orpheus had numerous connotations in Florence during this time, as Stanley Meltzoff rightly notes in his discussion of Ficino’s Orphic nickname in Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola: Theologica Poetica and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 128. Benivieni may be considered another Orpheus as much for his poetic or rhetorical eloquence as for his musical virtuosity. For more details concerning Benivieni’s life development, the most complete source remains Caterina Re’s Girolamo Benivieni fiorentino: Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1906). Testifying to the esteem Benivieni had earned in these studies is the fact that he was asked later in life to make an Italian vernacular translation of the Bible, a task that he never accomplished. See Olga Zorzi Pugliese, “Girolamo Benivieni: Umanista riformatore (dalla corrispondenza inedita),” Bibliofilia 72.3 (1970): 253–88. See Ludovico Passarini, Sepulcrum Dantis (Florence: Libreria Dante, 1883), 10. From Savonarola, the Scelta di prediche e scritti di Fra Girolamo Savonarala con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita, edited by. P. Villari and E. Casanova (Florence: Sansoni, 1889), 493. According to Dionisotti in “Dante nel Quattrocento,” 377. This work, Commento di Hieronymo Benivieni a più sue cantone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza Divina (Florence: Antonio Tubini, Lorenzo (de Alopo) Veneziano e Andrea Ghirlandi, 1500), combines poetry and prose, much like Dante’s Vita nuova and Convivio, for instance, but also contains some elements that evoke Dante’s Commedia, as well. Even though Benivieni’s Commento and Dante’s Commedia are admittedly quite different in tone, genre, and intent, Benivieni shows his debt to Dante, for instance, in the Commento’s narration of the Soul’s narrow escape from the whirlpool of damnation to its arrival at the heavenly Jerusalem. Benivieni’s work consists of precisely one hundred self-glossed lyric poems, divided into three parts, reflecting Dante’s hundred cantos in three canticles.

200

44

45

46

47

Notes to pages 90–1

The three parts of the Commento correspond roughly to the poet’s fall, repentance, and reascension in God’s grace. The Commento contains, moreover, significant references to some of Dante’s most recognizable characters, including Francesca da Rimini and Ulysses, and to Dantean treatments of such concepts as memory and exile. It may be possible that Benivieni’s reputation as a dantista also came from his work in editing Antonio Manetti’s “Dialogo circa il sito, la forma, e le misure dell’Inferno di Dante” (Dialogue on the Site, Form, and Dimensions of Dante’s Inferno). Benivieni in the 1506 “Dialogo” honours his deceased friend Manetti by reassembling Manetti’s notes on the Commedia’s first canticle. The work likely circulated in manuscript prior to its publication in 1506. “La concubina di Titone antico/già s’imbiancava al balco d’orïente,/fuor de le braccia del suo dolce amico” (“The concubine of ancient Tithonus was already/turning white on the eastern balcony, having left/the arms of her sweet lover,” trans. Durling). There seems to be some confusion concerning the relationship between Tithonus and Aurora. As Charles S. Singleton notes, Dante is unique in calling her Tithonus’s concubine, since most interpreters describe Aurora as his spouse. Benivieni appears to refer to another understanding of the myth, which holds Aurora to be the daughter of Tithonus’s wife, Dawn, and not the self-same figure. On Dante’s conviction that early morning dreams are true, see Inf. 26.7: “Ma se presso al mattin del ver si sogna …” See also Purg. 9.13–18, and his Convivio II, viii, 13. On Benivieni’s “Cantico” as dream narrative akin to Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with evident Dantean influence, see Bigi, Forme e significati nella “Divina Commedia”, 158. Benivieni likely had in mind other exclamations honouring Dante in his citation “Honorate l’altissimo poeta.” Benivieni would have been well aware of the inscription (ca. 1430) by Antonio Neri beneath the portrait of Dante in the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore: “LA MANO/Onorate l’altissimo poeta/ch’è nostro, e tiellosi Ravenna,/perchè di lui non è chi n’abbia pieta …” (THE HAND: Honour the greatest poet who is ours, but Ravenna keeps him because there is nobody [here] who feels pity for him …) The emphasis is mine. “Cantico,” lines 62–6: “colui che ’l grido/Sì sopr’ ogn’altro poetando acquista,/Che non pur solo a l’uno e l’altro Guido/Tolt’ ha la gloria della lingua ’l nome/Ma con lor tratto ogn’altro ha fuor del nido” (he who acquires higher acclaim than every other poet through his writing, such that not only from both Guidos has he taken the pre-eminent place in the [vernacular] language, but with them has cast all others from the nest).

Notes to pages 91–2

201

48 The exchange between the spirit of Oderisi da Gubbio and Dante the pilgrim takes place on the purgatorial ledge of pride where Dante participates to a limited extent in the act of penance for that sin, as marked by his way of proceeding stooped like the souls carrying massive boulders on their backs. I noted Benivieni’s acknowledgment of his own risk of excessive pride in the allusion to the Phaeton myth and in the varying ways that the issue of poetic pride reasserts itself in Dante’s and Benivieni’s poems in “Dante as Piagnone Prophet: Girolamo Benivieni’s ‘Cantico in laude di Dante’ (1506),” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 49–80. The risk of pride may also be suggested, for instance, in Benivieni’s repetition of “to me … to me” (“ad me … ad me”) in “Cantico” line 70. The anaphoric echo may intend to recall the “io son, io son” of the Siren in another of Dante’s prophetic dreams (Purg. 19.19). Certainly there is cause to question Benivieni’s show of poetic humility. Unlike the long tradition of poets, including Dante, who repeatedly beg the muses to come to their aid, Benivieni penned a vision in which all nine ladies without prompting circle round him. Moreover, Benivieni enjoys the special favour of being transported directly to the Earthly Paradise, skipping over a journey through hell or up the mountain of Purgatory. Similar to Dante’s flight up to the first purgatorial ledge, to which a sleeping Dante was snatched up by St Lucy in the form of an eagle, Benivieni seems to ascend the mountain while dozing, “nor do I know how between earth and heaven” (“né so già com’ infra la terr’ e ’l cielo,” line 15). 49 Concerning the Florentine Studio’s promotion of Dante as a Neoplatonic poet-philosopher, see Bigi, Forme e significati nella “Divina Commedia”, especially 157–61. Bigi sees no coincidence in the fact that it was precisely Lorenzo de’ Medici who after more than fifty years reinstated the push to bring Dante’s remains back to Florence: “lo sappiamo da una lettera di Antonio Manetti, che ricorda a Lorenzo una promessa in proposito da lui fatta (la coincidenza è significativa) durante i funerali di Matteo Palmieri, l’autore della Città di Vita” (we know this from a letter by Antonio Manetti reminding Lorenzo of the promise he made in this regard – and the coincidence is significant – during the funeral of Matteo Palmieri, author of the City of Life). Bigi further emphasizes Lorenzo’s promotion of a civicideological agenda: “vede egli [Lorenzo] pure in Dante soprattutto, come aveva detto il Ficino, un ‘filosofo poetico’, e in concreto un modello da imitare specialmente in opere ispirate ai concetti e ai gusti dell’ambiente neoplatonico” (Lorenzo sees above all in Dante, as Ficino also did, a “poetic philosopher,” and in concrete terms a model to imitate, especially in the works inspired by the concepts and tastes of the Neoplatonic milieu).

202

Notes to pages 92–7

50 In fact, Benivieni’s claim to know the Commedia well because he has read it many times parallels Dante’s claim to know Virgil’s Aeneid by heart (Inf. 20.113–14). 51 “Cantico,” lines 139–44. This passage, similar to various other ones from Benivieni’s poem, may echo different possible sources without preferring one to another. Underlying these “Cantico” verses in which Benivieni describes himself as having been “snatched” to another place, may be both Francesca da Rimini’s coy remark, “Amor ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende” (my emphasis) from Inf. 5.100 and the Stilnovistic tradition it carries with it, as well as a specific contemporary source: Marsilio Ficino’s De Raptu Pauli (On the Rapture of St Paul), a dialogue between Ficino and St Paul that allegorizes, according to Neoplatonic notions, the account of St Paul being caught up into paradise (II Cor. 12:2–4). 52 The first of the Paradiso passages alluded to the anti-imperial Florentine political forces that condemned Dante to exile: “Se la gente ch’al mondo più traligna/non fosse stata a Cesare noverca,/ma come madre a suo figlio benigna,/tal fatto è fiorentino e cambia e merca …” (Par. 16.58–61; “If the people who are most degenerate in the world had not been a step-mother to Caesar, but kindly, as a mother toward her son, such a one has become a Florentine and changes money and sells”). In the second passage, “Cacciaguida” confirmed and explained previous prophecies of Dante’s imminent exile by comparing Dante’s plight to that of Hippolytus from Athens: “Qual si partio Ipolito d’Atene/per la spietata e perfida noverca,/ tal di Fiorenza partir ti convene./Questo si vuole e questo già si cerca,/e tosto verrà fatto a chi ciò pensa/là dove Cristo tutto dì si merca” (Par. 17.46–51; “As Hippolytus left Athens because of his pitiless, treacherous step-mother: so must you leave Florence. This is willed, this is already sought, and soon will be done by him who plans it where Christ is sold all day long”). 53 As with the reference to Phaeton earlier in the “Cantico,” there may be another exorcism of the risks of pride in this tercet. Benivieni speaks of his native city in a way that calls to mind the ledge where sins of pride are atoned in Dante’s Purgatorio. On the ledge’s walls and walkways, Dante the pilgrim scrutinizes bas reliefs, friezes, and other visual representations that both discourage the sin of pride and encourage the virtue of humility through allusions to exemplary stories. 54 Par. 16.28–9: “Come s’avviva a lo spirar d’i venti/carbone in fiamma” (“As in the breathing of the wind a coal livens in the flames”). 55 See Lentzen, “Le lodi di Firenze di Cristoforo Landino,” 41–2. 56 Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, 1.379–80.

Notes to pages 97–9

203

57 Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, 1.380. Like Landino, Benivieni did not stop at praising Dante in his “Cantico.” Rather, he added to those praises a familiar call to civic virtue. 58 On the political and economic ramifications of Florentine and Venetian typesetting rivalries, see the 1972 doctoral dissertation by William Anthony Pettas, “The Giunti of Florence: Merchant Publishers of the Sixteenth Century” (University of California, Berkeley). 59 Benivieni continued to evoke Landino’s example by including in the 1506 edition the “Dialogo circa il sito, la forma, e le misure dell’Inferno di Dante.” In the 1481 edition, in fact, Landino offered a discourse on the “Sito, forma e misura dello ’Nferno e statura de’ giganti e di Lucifero.” Benivieni thus framed his text of the Commedia in such a way as to call explicitly to mind Landino’s edition. However, Benivieni also made a point of showing his independence from his predecessor by underscoring the places in which he was correcting and revising Landino’s earlier assertions on the subject. 60 By focusing on the political motivations of literary editing, I bring to the 1506 edition the kind of attention that has already been granted to the 1481 Landino edition of the Commedia by scholars such as Cardini, Alison Brown, Field, and Jacoff. 61 In a previous study, “Dante as Piagnone Prophet,” from which I have taken this part of my analysis, I went on to trace in detail how some symbols, such as the lion, could be adopted to signify different things to different audiences. Sergio Di Benedetto’s subsequent points on the matter are well taken. In “Girolamo Benivieni e la questione della lingua: Alcune considerazioni sulle correzioni al Commento del 1500,” ACME: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Milano 63.1 (2010): 165–203, he states that some of my hypotheses for the identification of the lion are to be preferred to others. Some associations do resonate more strongly. Nevertheless, my intent has been not so much to limit interpretations as to consider potential polyvalences, ambiguities, and associations as a way of deepening both the literary understanding of Benivieni’s work and the political understanding of the tensions that are also inherent in it. As a piagnone moderate in Florence in the wake of Savonarola’s death at the stake and subsequent political upheavals, Benivieni would want to cultivate the widest symbolic ambiguities. Consideration of the “Elegia Iohannis Pici Mirandulae adolescentis Egregij ad Florentiam in laudem Hieronymi Beniuenij eius ciuis” (Elegy in Praise of Girolamo Benivieni) in my previous study also provides clues to understanding the rhetorical and poetic techniques that its writer

204

62 63

64 65 66

67

68 69 70

71

Notes to pages 100–6

(or writers) uses to associate the spirit of Dante with piagnone ideas and imagery. I refer readers to all of these studies, and to the previous scholarship of Donald Weinstein and Lorenzo Polizzotto for further treatment of these questions. This letter and the next two from the Accademia appear in Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, ed. del Balzo, 4:474–5. In addition to signing this letter, Benivieni wrote another letter to Lucrezia de’ Medici Salviati with the same request to forward to her brother. For further details, please see Pugliese, “Girolamo Benivieni,” 254n8. Cited from Pasolini, Ravenna e le sue grandi memorie, 155. Phillimore, Dante at Ravenna, 215. From the official documents of the city of Ravenna, collected and published by Corrado Ricci in L'ultimo rifugio di Dante Alighieri (Milan: Hoepli, 1891), 358. Dennis Looney, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 31–2, traces a similar nationalistic spirit in the calls for the renovation of Ludovico Ariosto’s tomb in Ferrara in the 1880s. For more on the Romantic reception of Dante, see Aldo Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo, vol. 4, parts 1 and 2 of Storia letteraria d’Italia (Padua: La Nuova Libraria Editrice, 1981), and Francesco Mazzoni, “Il culto di Dante nell’Ottocento e la Società Dantesca Italiana,” Studi danteschi 71 (2006): 335– 59, as well as the recent contribution in English by Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Giambattista Giuliani, Nella solenne deposizione delle ritrovate ossa di Dante nell’antico loro sepolcro (Genoa: La donna e la famiglia, 1865), 3. Giuliani, Nella solenne deposizione, 5. Both quotations from Giuseppe Riminesi are from his Dante Alighieri e Ravenna Carme con note illustrative anche sul rinvenimento delle sacre ceneri (Ravenna: Gaetano Angeletti, 1865), 9–10. Giorgio Gruppioni traces the history of Dante’s skeletal remains into the twentieth century with irresistible allusions to the reappearances of Dante’s spirit at séances, including those recounted in “Dantis Ossa” by Nella Doria Cambon in Il convegno celeste (Turin: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1933), 255–67. English Romantic poets also contributed to the controversy surrounding Dante’s bones, conjuring his ghost to make their points even more forcefully. Perhaps the most famous example is Byron’s poetic composition in four cantos titled The Prophecy of Dante. See The Works of Lord Byron. Poetry, vol. 4, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London and New York: John Murray/Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905). In this work,

Notes to pages 106–7

205

penned in 1819, the English exile hoped to incite Italians to change their political destiny – to revolt against Bourbon rule and to seize a specifically Italian national political identity that he believed that Dante had foreseen centuries earlier. In the ancient pine grove of Ravenna, Byron attributes words to the spirit of Dante, words that probably imply a sentiment similar to what he feels with respect to his own homeland of England: “Alas! how bitter is his country’s curse/To him who for that country would expire” (lines 69–70ff). In this way, Byron harnessed a particularly strong rhetorical strategy by ventriloquizing his own poetic, personal, and political aspirations through a dead poet hero. 72 Identification of the author is uncertain. Carlo del Balzo refers to the author as the “Anonimo della Magliabechiano” (anonymous writer of the Magliabechiano papers, Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, 4.473), but Phillimore attributes the poem to a Baldassare Alvisi. In Dante at Ravenna, she also elaborated on Florentines’ dismay at not finding Dante’s bones and their explanation: “‘And thus,’ recites the memorial drawn up by Carlo Nardi to Pope Leo, ‘there could be no translation made of the bones of Dante, because the deputies from the Accademia (Medicea) having visited his tomb, they found Dante neither in soul nor yet in body; and it being believed that he had in his lifetime, in body as well as in spirit, made the journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, so in death it must now be assumed that in body as well as in spirit in either one or other of those realms he has been received and welcomed.’ Whether or not this explanation was considered satisfactory we do not know, but the very sudden death of Leo X early in the following year may account for no steps having been taken to press the matter further at the time” (198). There ensued the brief papacy of Adrian VI before Pope Clement VII ascended. Alvisi addressed his sonnet “Sommo Pastore” (Supreme Shepherd) to Clement VII, another Medici pope (Giulio de’ Medici, 1478– 1534). However, Clement VII had an array of even more pressing concerns to prevent him from mobilizing to translate Dante’s bones from Ravenna to Florence, not least of which were the events precipitating the 1527 Sack of Rome, including the Colonna family attack on his person, resulting in his imprisonment in the Castle of Sant’Angelo, and its aftermath. For a detailed account of the historical context, see Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), 4 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976–84). 73 Cited from del Balzo, Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, 4:473. 74 While my focus in this chapter has been on Florentines’ attempts to repatriate Dante’s remains and assess their responses to non-Florentine

206

Notes to pages 109–11

editions of Dante’s Commedia, this is not to say that there are not other non-Florentine uses of Dante’s spirit. One of the most curious examples for propagandistic purposes is the Roman Giovanni Giacomo Riccio’s eidolopoeia of Dante in I diporti di Parnaso (The Pastimes of Parnasus, 1635) in order to criticize the use of the arquebus in bombardments. See del Balzo, Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, 5:584–7: “Dante contro l’archibugio e la bombarda.” 3. Genius Loci: Exile, Citizensip, and the Place of Burial 1 There is no textual evidence that Machiavelli knew or was aware of Ferreri’s Somnium. In fact the narratives, as I will show, are quite different and do not warrant explicit juxtaposition for any other reason than their inclusion of a Dante-spirit character. 2 For a near-contemporary definition of the piagnone, bigi, arrabbiati, palleschi, and other political factions of Florentine politics during the time, see Filippo de’ Nerli’s Commentarj dei fatti civili corsi dentro la città di Firenze dall’anno 1215 al 1537 (Trieste: Colombo Coen, 1859), 108–13. A critical edition of the work was presented by Sergio Rossi as a doctoral thesis to the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II during the 2005–6 academic year, available at: http://www.fedoa.unina.it/2921/1/Russo _Il_Testo_tra_Filologia_e_Storia.pdf. 3 Machiavelli, Opere letterarie, ed. Luigi Blasucci (Milan: Adelphi, 1964), 212. Page numbers for Machiavelli’s work refer to this edition. 4 These scholars include Giorgio Inglese, who, in his edition of Machiavelli’s Clizia, Andria, Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997), provides an insightful postilla (206–9) summarizing the mostly Italian critical and philological debates up to that point concerning the work’s questione della lingua. Among the scholars writing in English and contextualizing the Dialogo in broader linguistic, political, or philosophical debates are William J. Landon, Politics, Patriotism, and Language: Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Secular Patria” and the Creation of an Italian National Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), and Barbara Godorecci, After Machiavelli: “Re-writing” and the “Hermeneutic Attitude” (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993). 5 As Brian Richardson notes in “The Cinquecento: Prose,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 184, Machiavelli was reacting “to [Giangiorgio] Trissino’s adjective ‘Italian’ and to the way in which the Vicentine was using Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia to show that the greatest

Notes to pages 112–17

6

7

8

9 10

207

Florentine poet had advocated a poetic language which was not Florentine but ‘courtly’ (curialis). Claudio Tolomei of Siena (c. 1492–1556) argued in favour of the Tuscan (rather than narrowly Florentine) nature of the literary vernacular in Il Cesano (drafted by 1529).” Incidentally, this motif of dying again has precedents in classical literature, some with a similarly half-humorous, half-spiteful tone. See Ronald C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982), 26: “Some classical apparitions are very substantial indeed. One unusual example was the girl who returned six months after death to sleep with her lover. When her parents burst in on them, the ghost, after angrily telling them to mind their own business, ‘died’ again.” For biographical details of Ferreri’s life, I supplement summaries by Carlo del Balzo and M.E. Bernardo Morsolin, “Un latinista del Cinquecento imitatore di Dante,” Atti del Reale Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti 7 (1893–4): 1429–46, with the excellent entry for the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1925– ) by Eckehart Stöve. Del Balzo in Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, ed. del Balzo, 14 vols. (Rome: Forzani E.C., 1893–1908), 4.402, cites (Girolamo) Tiraboschi for the claim that Ferreri earned a third laurea – in poetics – during the twoyear period he spent in Rome, but it was more likely, according to Stöve, that Ferreri was publically recognized for his Latin poetic compositions. The full text of Ferreri’s Lugdunense somnium appears in Carlo del Balzo’s Poesie di mille autori, 4.373–403. The title seems to suggest some kind of allusion to the Dream of Scipio, but the spirit featured in Ferreri’s poem is somewhat different from Cicero’s. “Io non so se il titolo del poemetto gli sia stato suggerito dal ‘Somnium’ di Scipione, rimastoci de’ libri De Republica di Cicerone: è certo che tra l’uno e l’altro corre una qualche analogia; tanto che si può dire che il frammento del filosofo antico non sia sfuggito al Ferreri, come non era sfuggito in antecedenza all’Alighieri” (Morsolin, “Un latinista del Cinquecento imitatore di Dante,” 1435; I do not know if the title of the short poem had been suggested by the Dream of Scipio, left to us in the books of Cicero’s Republic. It is certain that some analogy runs between them, such that one can say that the ancient philosopher’s fragment had not escaped Ferreri, just as it had not previously escaped the attention of Alighieri). Charles L. Stinger, “Roman Humanist Images of Rome,” in Rome Capitale (1447–1527), ed. Sergio Gensini (Pisa: Pacini, 1994), 16. See Morsolin, “Un latinista del Cinquecento imitatore di Dante,” 1443: “Non che il Ferreri disconoscesse d’esser trasceso specialmente nella parte avuta del Concilio di Pisa; ma di questo eccesso si fa scusare dall’Alighieri

208

Notes to pages 117–18

medesimo, che pure ebbe a oltrepassare talvolta i giusti confini e che del proprio errore trovava le attenuanti nell’esempio di tanti grandi uomini, anche santi, tratti per soverchio acume di ingegno a bandir come vero ciò, ch’era falso e riabilitati poi per la sincera ritrattazion dell’errore” (Not that Ferreri did not recognize that he had overdone it, especially in the part he played in the Council of Pisa. But he makes Alighieri himself excuse this excess, Dante who also had occasion to exceed the just bounds sometimes, an error that he found ways of softening because of the example [of it] in so many great men, even saints, taken by excessive acumen of genius to announce as true that which was false, and later forgiven for their sincere retraction of the error). Moreover, the figure of Dante lends particular weight to Ferreri’s assertion because “L’Alighieri costituiva allora, come adesso, la gloria più grande di Firenze: e il fatto non poteva sfuggire certo al Ferreri per dare maggior rilievo ad un altro, che tornava a grande onore della città” (1440; Alighieri constituted then, as he does now, the greatest glory of Florence). 11 See Morsolin, “Un latinista del Cinquecento imitatore di Dante,” 1439. 12 Passages from Ficino’s proem to the De Monarchia are cited from Mario Martelli, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento: Il filtro degli anni sessanta (Florence: Le Lettere, 1996), 60. The second citation reads: “peregrine quelli che fuori di detta città sono, ma non iudicati in sempiterno essilio” (Pilgrims are those who are outside the said city, but are not judged to be in perpetual exile). 13 Luigi Vignali has provided an excellent critical edition of Caviceo’s work under the title Il Peregrino (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1993). All of the citations of the Peregrino indicate page numbers from this edition. Some portions of this section are taken from my previous study “Dante Ravennate and Boccaccio Ferrarese? Post-Mortem Residency and the Attack on Florentine Literary Hegemony, 1480–1520,” Viator 35 (2004): 543–62. According to Vignali (xiii–xiv), there is a particular significance in the city of publication for Caviceo’s last and most important works: “La scelta di Parma, come luogo di pubblicazione (in questa stessa città egli farà pubblicare, l’anno seguente, anche la successiva ed ultima sua opera, in latino, il Confessionale), sarà stata presumibilmente determinate dal desiderio del Caviceo di essere presente, se non con la propria persona, almeno con le sue due ultime, e maggiori, opere nell’amata città natale (a Parma è dedicato, nel romanzo, il riferimento relativamente più ampio e circostanziato; il Caviceo andrà a morire appena fuori dal territorio di giurisdizione parmense)” (xii; The choice of Parma as the place of publication (in this same city he will also see published the following year

Notes to pages 119–23

14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21 22

209

the next and final work of his in Latin the Confessional) presumably must have been determined by Caviceo’s desire to be present, if not in person, then with his due last and most important works in his beloved birth city (in the novel the relatively broadest and most detailed reference is dedicated to Parma; Caviceo will go to just outside Parma’s jurisdictional territory to die)). Marcello Turchi’s characterization of Peregrino, who initially seeks to avoid Love’s snares, as a “novello, ma appesantito, Iulo delle Stanze” (a new, but heavier Giulio from [Angelo Poliziano’s] Stanze) is not entirely inaccurate, either. “Composizione e situazione del romanzo umanistico di Iacopo Caviceo,” Aurea Parma: Rivista di Storia, Letteratura e Arte 46 (1962): 13. Nonetheless, I believe Turchi’s assessment of the work as a whole as merely escapist literature and, what is worse, an example that “si perde in sostanza in una prova dilettantesca e divulgativa” (16, “is substantively lost in an amateurish and popularizing attempt”) is unduly harsh. Despite the work’s occasional long-windedness, it takes a substantial leap beyond Boccaccian romance toward the complex agency of Renaissance works. Certainly it is far more coherent and engaging in its narrative development than its near contemporary, the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance. Lorenza Simona has written an indispensable biography of Caviceo, which presents the fruits of painstaking archival research: Giacomo Caviceo: Uomo di chiesa, d’armi e di lettere (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974). I refer the reader seeking greater detail to that study, of which I sketch only some highlights here. Simona, Giacomo Caviceo, 55. Simona, Giacomo Caviceo, 55–85. According to Simona in Giacomo Caviceo, 96–7. Besides the Peregrino, Caviceo penned other works, but none of them resemble the Peregrino in terms of genre or quality of the narrative. These include the Lupa (The She-Wolf), a life of his patron Pier Maria Rossi, a dialogue on Mary’s virginity, an anti-Semitic Libellus contra Hebreos (Tract against the Jews), and the aforementioned Confessionale. See Simona’s study, Giacomo Caviceo. Some critics, according to Luigi Vignali in his introduction to the 1993 edition of the Peregrino, have suggested (and contested) that the protagonist’s name might allude to Pier Maria Rossi’s love interest, Bianca Pelligrini. See his summary of the debate on p. xvii, especially note 22. See also the discussion concerning the dissolution of the body at the point of death in Peregrino 2.31 (p. 205). The translation is from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling; notes by Ronald L. Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011).

210

Notes to pages 123–8

23 While the Peregrino has earned a reputation as a racy, erotic tale, Clive Griffin is correct in noting that only two of the work’s more than two hundred chapters could be described as erotic. “Giacomo Caviceo’s Libro del Peregrino: The Fate of an Italian Wanderer in Spain,” in Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Conor Fahy, ed. Anna Laura Lepschy, John Took, and Dennis E. Rhodes (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986), 132–46 (note 2). Nonetheless, Caviceo’s reputation for womanizing probably contributed to this erotic emphasis in his novel’s reception. It is very curious that when the seventeenth-century writer Nicolas Chorier wrote the patently pornographic Dialogues of Luisa Sigea (Aloisiae Sigae Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et veneris), he gave to his male protagonist the highly uncommon name of Caviceo, likely taking advantage of the name’s potential for double entendre as well. Caviceo is a Latinized form of Cavizzi, a screw. 24 The spirit of Boccaccio asserts “cittadina” in the feminine gender here because he emphasizes his state of being as “ombra,” shade. 25 Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 1:151. Moreover, Landino is in turn echoing passages from Boccaccio’s works, including from Filocolo 1.2 and from the Prologue of the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta. 26 Caviceo could not have meant Filippo Beroaldo the Younger, the Tacitus scholar, Latin poet, and prefect of the Vatican Library under Pope Leo X, who also receives mention in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (46.13), since he was still alive when Caviceo imagines the ghostly encounter in 1508. The younger Beroaldo died in 1518. 27 “Ma credi, veramente, che fu insognio? L’anima nostra è perspicace a movere il senso dal subiecto e mutarlo ad ogni forma; e secundo se ritrova il subiecto costante e disposito, così gli rendeno o timore o letitia … Tali son a la fiata le representatione de la mente nostra, quali son gli pensieri e cogitati; et in quel habito ne apareno li simulacri, quali gli desideremo vedere” (127; Do you really believe that it was a dream? Our soul is keen to move the sense of the subject and change it into every form; and according to whether the subject is constant and so disposed, it is moved by fear or pleasure … So on the face are the representations of our mind, such as the thoughts and imaginings; and in this way simulacri appear, which we wish to see). 28 Macrobius, pre-eminent commentator of Cicero’s dream narrative, also gets passing mention in the Peregrino (283). 29 It is tempting to wonder whether Caviceo, in his position as vicar general of Ravenna, could have had some direct influence in keeping Dante’s remains out of Florentine control. Despite my best research efforts in

Notes to pages 128–31

30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37

211

various Italian archives, I have not found any proof that Florentine petitions passed directly through Caviceo’s hands. However, it is not unthinkable that the vicar general of Ravenna might be carefully informed of these attempts to remove one of the treasures now housed in one of the churches for which he had oversight responsibilities. Nella Giannetto, Bernardo Bembo umanista e politico veneziano (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 156. Giulio Bertoni, L’“Orlando furioso” e la Rinascenza a Ferrara (Modena: Umberto Orlandini, 1919), 213–14. Bertoni, L’“Orlando furioso”, 180. See Achille Tartaro, “La prosa narrativa antica,” in La narrativa italiana dalle Origini ai giorni nostri, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 43–140, and Enrico Carrara’s edition of the Opere di Iacopo Sannazzaro con saggi dell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di Francesco Colonna e del Peregrino di Iacopo Caviceo (Turin: UTET, 1952). In the introduction to Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ed. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele, 2 vols. (Milan: Adelphi, 1998), xxxvii. The original text of Il Giudicio estremo appears in Corrado Ricci, Il sepolcro e le ossa di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 17. Ricci, Il sepolcro e le ossa di Dante, 30. Gasparo Martinetti Cardoni, Dante Alighieri in Ravenna: Memorie storiche con documenti (Ravenna: Gaetani Angeletti, 1864), also noted that the sonnet, which accompanied a portrait of Dante donated to the city of Ravenna by Giovanni Rasponi, was recorded by Tommaso Tomai in his record of notable things in Ravenna in the sixteenth century. Neither nineteenth-century contribution mentions the poet’s identity. Benivieni mentions to his dedicatee Giovanfrancesco Pico in the proem of his Commento di Hieronymo Benivieni a più sue canzone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza Divina (also known as his Canzoni e sonetti con commento, published in Florence by Antonio Tubini et al. in 1500), 1r: “ecco subito come a Dio piacque fu per corporale morte alli occhi nostri subtracto epso mio bene Iohanni Pico predecto: La cui troppo certo acerba morte/& come infra le altre presente afflictione di tutta Italia per tempo prima/cosi certo per damno non ultima clamita de la christiana Republica/mi afflixe alhora intanto/che subito in el porto del mio poco innanzi male abrupto silentio mi ritrassi: Parendomi che insieme con quello mi fussi tolta ogni occasione di mai piu dovere scrivere alcuna cosa/o comporre” (then suddenly, as God willed, my dear Giovanni Pico whom I already mentioned was taken before our eyes by bodily death. His so surely bitter death, paramount among the other afflictions that befell all of Italy at the time, certainly

212

38 39

40 41

42

Notes to pages 131–2

not the least of the calamities for its damage to the Christian Republic, so pained me then that I immediately withdrew [my intent to launch the present Commento, figured as a barque] back to the port of silence. It seemed to me that with him was taken from me every occasion to ever write or compose another thing). Caterina Re details these episodes in the life of Pico in Girolamo Benivieni fiorentino: Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1906), 82–3. His collection of love poetry does not seem to be inspired by passion as much as it is by poetic emulation. Moreover, Re in Girolamo Benivieni Fiorentino, 77–8, convincingly argues against those critics who imply that there may have been “una relazione meno che onesta fra i due” (a lessthan-honest relationship between the two men). Re, Girolamo Benivieni, 83–4. According to Caterina Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e di Girolamo Benivieni in S. Marco di Firenze,” in In memoria di Oddone Ravenna (Padua: Fratelli Gallina, 1904), 129. See Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 127. Pico was certainly not the only personage of renown to request what was considered by contemporaries an unworthy burial arrangement. Petrarch in his will requested that his body be buried without any extravagance in the chapel that he had had made, according to what he could afford, in honour of the Virgin Mary. Instead, those who survived him determined that Petrarch should be praised in a regal sermon by the celebrated Bonaventura da Peraga, and that his body should be placed in a coffin covered by a gold cloth under a baldacchino of gold and ermine in front of the said chapel in an exquisite sepulchre upon four columns, etc., as described by Marcantonio Micoletti in his biography of Petrarch, excerpted in Solerti, Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo decimosesto (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1904), 538–64: “Il Petrarca puoco dinanzi aveva in Padova fatto il suo testamento, et espressamente comandato che ’l corpo suo senza pompa fosse sepolto nella capella ch’egli, non secondo il suo desiderio ma le forze dell’avere, aveva in onore della santissima Vergine madre fabricata. Ma perché il rispetto de’ meriti non tenuto alle volte alla disposizione del meritevole, non defraudò giammai di dovuti premi il valore, avendo prima in lode del defunto recitato un real sermone Bonaventura da Peraga, frate eremitano, teologo eccellentissimo, et poi per qualità d’eccellenza fatto cardinale, il corpo disteso in una bara, coperta di panno d’oro sotto un baldacchino d’oro e d’armellini, dinanzi la porta dell’istessa capella, fu posto in un superbo sepolcro, sovra quattro colonne, con la base di due gradi di pietra rossa: che cosí Francesco d’Amicolo,

Notes to pages 132–4

43 44

45 46

47

213

milanese di porta Vercellina, erede del morto, e marito di una illegittima figliuola del Petrarca, giudicò convenirsi al sopra glorioso nome del socero, facendo ancora nella tomba intagliar questo epitaffio di cadenza conforme, a modo delle rime volgari: ‘Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;/ Suscipe Virgo parens animam; sate Virgine parce,/Fessaque jam terris coeli requiescat in arce’” (556). Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 123; the emphasis is hers. Benivieni stated in Commento that “molte erano per certo le cagioni/ le quali mi sforzavano ad amare questo unico infra le cose humane & singulare mio bene” (1v; many were certainly the reasons that induced me to love this unique good of mine among all human things). The qualities that Pico possessed included “la grandeza dello admirabile & sopra a qualunche altro de la nostra eta eminente suo ingegno: La excellentia de la multiplice & incomparabile sua doctrina: la elegantia de costumi in universo: & in particulare la innata & oltre a ogni fede incredibile mansuetudine/gratia & benignita: Lascio in drieto la prudentia/lascio el iudicio/lascio tutte le altre sue rare & a pochi con si larga mano da Dio concedute virtu: Non dico alcuna cosa de la belleza del corpo/de la nobilita del sangue/de la affluenza de le riccheze” (1v; the greatness of his admirable genius, eminent above all others of our age; the excellence of quantity and quality of his doctrine; the elegance of his habits in everything; and in particular his innate and beyond all belief incredible mildness, grace, and goodness. I leave aside his prudence, his judgment, all of his other rare virtues, so infrequently conceded by God with such a generous hand. I say nothing about the beauty of his body, the nobility of his blood, or the abundance of his riches). According to Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 139–40, repeated in Girolamo Benivieni, 97. Re indicates (“La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 112) that ms. Riccardiano 2811 contains the two sonnets, transcribed along with other works by Girolamo Benivieni by his grandnephew. Girolamo probably wrote the poems, Re conjectures, between 1531, when the duke’s rule began, and 1537, the year of the duke’s death (131). This hypothesis leaves open the possibility that Benivieni resorted to writing the sonnets in Pico’s voice only after his political attempts as part of the Duecento were unsuccessful. The Italian version is transcribed from Re’s version (“La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 113) with two corrections: substitution of apostrophe for accent on “e” in “S’e’” (line 3) and correction of the spelling of “ossa” (line 11).

214

Note to pages 134

48 Re emphasizes what she perceives as the inexplicable strangeness in Benivieni’s addressing the Bishop and the Duke of Florence, potential enemies of the Savonarolan Pico, in the titles of these sonnets (“La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 137ff). But Benivieni was a nuanced and cleverly diplomatic personality, never an extremist partisan. Even in his years of closest adhesion to the piagnone ethos, he continued to cultivate Medicean friendships. One need only call to mind an anecdote provided by Antonio Benivieni the Younger in his Vita di Girolamo Benivieni (Archivio di Stato Firenze, codice Gianni, n. 43 of the Leonetti Mannucci Gianni archives). At a dinner party hosted by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Benivieni found himself the only one at the table willing to defend the reforms of Savonarola’s government, well after the friar had been executed. The other guests lambasted the piagnoni without mercy, anticipating that they would shame Benivieni. The cardinal finally intervened: “Girolamo voi fate professione di credere al Frate, come può stare l’essere insiememente amico et affezzionato nostro?” (40v–41r; Girolamo, you make the profession of belief in the friar, how can it be that you are at the same time our friend and intimate?). Benivieni silenced his instigators with his prompt reply: “Monsignore mio, se l’opera del Frate è humana, la si risolverà presto per se stessa; se l’è di Dio, che ché gli homini se ne facciano, l’andrà per certo innanzi. Ma Vossignoria Illustrissima non tema già mai delli amici e devoti del Frate, essi aspettando il miracolo, e che Dio operi, quieti se ne stanno. Guardisi bene ella da alcuni di questi mormoratori inquieti che l’ha d’attorno, i quali, sempre insatiabili, non restano o resteranno già mai di travagliare, e nuovi e vasti concetti concependo altrui sollevare per compimento e sfogo dei loro smoderati appetiti” (41r–41v; Monsignor mine, if the friar’s work is human, it will resolve itself quickly on its own; but if it is of God, then no matter what men might do, it will move ahead. But your Excellency need not ever fear the friar’s friends and disciples, who quietly await the miracle that God might work. Rather guard yourself well against these dissatisfied slanderers around you who, insatiable, never cease to trouble others with their impious machinations and to vent their excessive appetites). I consider this episode at greater length in “Piagnone Exemplarity and the Florentine Literary Canon in the Vita di Girolamo Benivieni,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 27.1 (2006): 3–20. I argue that it would be reasonable to expect that, in addition to support that he had from members of the Pico family, especially Gianfrancesco Pico, Benivieni might need the support of both secular and religious authorities to exhume and reinter his friend’s remains.

Notes to pages 134–5

215

49 See Leon Dorez, “La mort de Pic de la Mirandole et l’édition Aldine des oeuvres d’Ange Politien (1494–1497),” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 32 (1898): 360–4, cited in Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 126. Moreover, Re notes, “Strane le suppliche in proposito al vescovo d’Assisi e per lui ad Alessandro, a quell’Alessandro, non tenero certo del Savonarola e dei Savonaroliani, che occupava il seggio perduto già da Piero de’ Medici, presunto mandatario dell’assassinio del Pico” (137; The requests in this regard to the bishop of Assisi and through him to Alessandro are strange, since Alessandro certainly did not concern himself about Savonarola and the Savonarolans who occupied the seat lost by Piero de’ Medici, presumably the one who ordered the assassination of Pico). Pico’s death at the age of thirty-one, after thirteen days of inexplicable fevers, was considered suspicious even in his own time. According to Jader Jacobelli in Quei due Pico della Mirandola: Giovanni e Gianfrancesco (Rome: Laterza, 1993), who cites Marin Sanudo’s Diarii, nearly three years after Pico’s death, the government directed by Savonarola arrested partisans of Piero de’ Medici, presumably to thwart an attempted coup. Five of the arrested men, including Pico’s former secretary, Cristoforo di Casalmaggiore, who confessed to poisoning Pico, were decapitated. Nonetheless, confessions under torture, as this one was, are not reliable. Others have also speculated that, given the contentious inheritance struggles within the Pico family, the young count might have had a mortal enemy among them, if indeed he was poisoned at all. 50 Re, “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” 139. 51 The full title to this composition is “In persona del medesimo S. Conte Giovanni Pico a Gir.mo Benivieni: exhortalo a perseverare nel chiedere la sopradecta gratia con certa speranza di impetrarla come facilmente fia ’mpetrata” (In the person of that same Count Giovanni Pico to Girolamo Benivieni, exhorting him to persevere in petitioning the above-mentioned favour with a certain hope of receiving it in as much as it is easily received). 52 Like Poliziano’s Nutricia, dedicated to the spirit of Lorenzo, Benivieni recovers important associations between Lorenzo and the laurel. According to Stephen Murphy, The Gift of Immortality: Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 186–7: “The ideal portrait of Lorenzo in Nutricia, far from being extraneous flattery, forms the culmination of the poem. It befits a poem of the genre sylva to declare its debt to the patron’s shade. And yet, that shade also has the effect of setting the poem in opposition to itself. The essential phrase concerning Lorenzo the patron, securus ad umbram (730), clearly

216

Notes to page 136

recalls through its cadence and position the famous lentus in umbra from Virgil’s first Eclogue. Shade can be said to be ‘the sine qua non of pastoral repose,’ and thus of literary creation. As the protection necessary to rural otium, umbra also makes possible the reversion to primitivism that is inherent in pastoral. Anyone resting in the shade thereby assumes the role of a shepherd in the golden age. However, what is the central myth of Nutricia if not a denial of the golden age? … So it might be suspected that the generic metaphor of Poliziano’s Sylvae does not refer primarily to literary activity and literary history as Arcadia. The shade in which poets write is the shade of the selva that forms the original situation of poetry. The Florentine professor’s exploration of his genre means a return to wandering through the original wood; it means an attempt to renew the power of that original contact between the first barbarism and the first cure for barbarism. But still: there remains something more for poetry in the forest’s shade. Umbra evokes not only pastoral repose, not only the obscurity of origins, but also the dead. Umbrae populate the underworld in the Latin tradition. Orpheus’s descent, which, we recall, resumes the movement of inspiration, takes the poet to the realm of shades. Poliziano’s Sylvae and Nutricia, in particular, seek their inspiration in otium, in mythic origins, and among the dead.” 53 Concerning the request for Pico’s remains, see Jacobelli, Quei due Pico della Mirandola, 69. Isidoro del Lungo, Florentia: Uomini e cose del Quattrocento (Montepulciano: Le Balze, 2002), 279, notes the request for Poliziano’s remains: “Nella primavera del 1875 il Comune di Montepulciano chiedeva al Comune di Firenze che gli fosse concesso di trasferire le ossa del grande umanista alla città nativa, per onorarle di monumento nell’insigne tempio della Madonna di San Biagio. La dimanda restò senza effetto: ma se anche il Consiglio comunale fiorentino avesse deliberata tale concessione, è evidente che la estrema volontà di Angelo Poliziano di riposare in San Marco era ormai al sicuro” (In spring 1875, the Comune of Montepulciano asked the Comune of Florence for permission to transfer the bones of the great humanist to his native city, in order to honour him with a monument in the illustrious temple of the Madonna of San Biagio. The request remained unanswered. But even if the Council of the Florentine Comune had deliberated such a concession, it is evident that the final wishes of Angelo Poliziano to rest in San Marco were by now assured). 54 One might consider the question from the contrary perspective, as well: How absolute are expressed final wishes, or must human beings relinquish their will to determine any actions in this world once their spirits leave it?

Notes to pages 138–43

217

4. Habeas Corpus, Habeas Spiritum: Some Not-So-Final Thoughts 1 Here and following, the original is from Petrarch, Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), and the English translation of The Triumphs of Petrarch is by Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 2 Ghost stories, by the mere fact that they feature a spirit character, typically frustrate the audience’s expectation of closure. Unlike the detective novel or crime story, for instance, by the end of the ghost story, the figure of interest is still at large. See Jack Sullivan’s comparison in Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 10. Moreover, “Sci[ence] fi[ction] and detective stories progress toward clarity, transparency, and explicit illumination of a puzzle or concept. They depend on the power of reason and logic; they invariably explain themselves. Ghost stories, however, sabotage the relationship between cause and effect. The parts are self-consistent, but they relate to an inexplicable, irrational whole. Instead of lighting up, the stories darken into shadowy ambiguity; instead of depending on logic, they depend on suggestion and connotation” (134). 3 Since the spirit in Boccaccio’s story is a fictional ghost and not one that has any evidence of having historically lived, it is not an example of eidolopoeia as presented in previous chapters. 4 Page numbers for the Italian citations of Boccaccio’s Decameron are the Vittore Branca edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1987 [1980]. English translations of the Decameron here and following are by Guido Waldmen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5 Lodovico Domenichi, Historia di detti, e fatti degni di memoria di diversi principi e huomini private antichi et moderni (Venice: Gabriel Giolito De Ferrari, 1557), 543–4. 6 Though frightful, this image pales in comparison to that painted of him by his contemporary Peter Damian: “Peter Damian recorded a story that Benedict had been seen after his death in the form of a monster, half bear, half ass, doomed to prowl the surface of the earth until the last judgment.” E.R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), 74. 7 Theophylactus was son of Alberic III, Count of Tusculum, and the nephew of Pope Benedict VIII (who was pontiff during the period 1012–24) and Pope John XIX (1024–32). Theophylactus was approximately twenty years old when he became Pope Benedict IX. According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02429a.htm, consulted 12 August 2013), Benedict IX was briefly forced out of Rome

218

8 9

10

11

12

Notes to pages 143–6

in 1036; but, backed by Emperor Conrad II, he returned later that year. Hostile forces ousted him in 1044 and elected John, Bishop of Sabina, as Pope Sylvester III; Benedict IX returned to reclaim the seat of Peter early in 1045. In May 2045, however, Benedict IX, wishing to pursue marriage, resigned the papacy, reportedly selling the office to his godfather, John Gratian, who took the name Gregory VI. Soon regretting his decision, Benedict IX returned to Rome and reclaimed the papacy; Gregory VI continued to be recognized as the true pope. The Council of Sutri in December 1046 determined that Benedict IX and Sylvester III (who continued to claim the papacy) were deposed. Gregory VI was encouraged to resign, which he did. Pope Clement II succeeded him. Carlo Delcorno provides an excellent analysis of the genre in Exemplum e letteratura tra medioevo e rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989). The English translation is from Dom Augustine Calmet, Treatise on Vampires & Revenants: The Phantom World. Dissertation on those Persons who Return to Earth Bodily, the Excommunicated, the Oupires or Vampires, Vroucolacas, & c., trans. Henry Christmas, ed. Clive Leatherdale (Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993 [1850]), 116–17. Although Ottavia Niccoli does not treat the vision of Antonio da Rieti specifically, she offers many more examples of similar visions in the first chapter of her book Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del rinascimento (Rome: Laterza, 1987), translated into English by Lydia G. Cochrane as Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). In addition to tracing the sociological and political uses of these visions, she meticulously examines non-eidolopoetic forms of propaganda, including interpretations of ghost battles, monsters, and heavenly portents. She emphasizes in these cases the crucial role of the medium, the person who interprets the significance of perceived signs, extraordinary events, or visions. In literary eidolopoeia, the medium is the storyteller, the one who speaks for the dead. Codice Magliabechiano XXV, 344, fols. 33–6. The English translation presented here is from Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art, ed. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 232–5. Images of Quattrocento Florence, 232: “The Biblioteca Nazionale and other Florentine libraries possess a great number of fifteenth-century codices of prophecies, in which Florence is usually envisioned as the daughter of Rome, a daughter who will come to rescue her mother from the corruption of the clergy … As with [Girolamo] Savonarola’s prophecies at the end of the century, Antonio’s vision foretells the religious primacy of Florence and

Notes to pages 146–7

219

its future as a capital in which Christians can take shelter from heresy and violence.” 13 Another instance of a narrative written by a friar who claims to have received in a dream interpretations of apocalyptic visions from a dead saint or esteemed member of his religious order is by Giovanni Caroli (1429–1503). Caroli was a Florentine Dominican friar at Santa Maria Novella and author of Liber dierum lucensium (The Book of the Days of Lucca). According to Salvatore I. Camporeale, the third part of the Liber dierum “is a dream vision, a premonition of the future: the destruction of the conventual structures of Santa Maria Novella and the dissolution of the Florentine community”: “The dream reveals a vast plain lit by a sinister moonlight gleam as the last rays of the sun fade. Along the side of a mountain, rising in the middle of the plain, the conventual buildings of Santa Maria Novella gather around the church; the glimmering moonlight throws into sharp relief the architectural contours of the complex. While the Dominican gazes, fascinated, at the splendid nocturnal scene, an enormous multitude surrounds the monumental edifice and attacks it from all sides. The structures, so harmoniously arranged, collapse one after another, as if torn apart stone by stone. Nothing remains but an immense pile of rubble; a vast expanse of rocks and falling walls stretches out beneath the vault of heaven.” See Camporeale, “Giovanni Caroli, 1460–1480: Death, Memory, and Transformation,” in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 19–20. Afterward, “Giovanni Dominici and Antonino Pierozzi, whom Caroli considered the last of the great men of his order, appear in his dream and interpret its significance” (20). They proceed to state that the reason mendicant orders are in decline has to do with the waning spirit of their current members with respect to the zeal of the orders’ founders. Caroli goes on to use Pierozzi, whose status makes him a more authoritative mouthpiece, to pronounce his own opinions on the state of the Dominican order and the Florentine community, and the need for renewed caritas (21). 14 This section of Morelli’s Ricordi has become quite well known, given its treatment in various contexts by Claudio Varese, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Richard Trexler, and other scholars, though it likely was not widely known in its day because it appeared in a Florentine merchant’s ricordi, or daily account book. I cite the original here and in the following pages from Vittore Branca’s edition of Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra medioevo e rinascimento. Paolo da Certaldo, Giovanni Morelli, Bonaccorso Pitti, et al. (Milan: Rusconi, 1986).

220

Notes to pages 147–54

15 See Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 168–72. 16 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 175. 17 George W. McClure considers other responses to the death of one’s son in “The Art of Mourning: Autobiographical Writings on the Loss of a Son,” the fifth chapter of Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 93–115. 18 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 179, 19 Many readers, including Carmine Jannaco, in “I ‘Ricordi’ di Giovanni Morelli,” Città di vita 20 (1957), understand Morelli’s Ricordi as “letteratura moralistica” (64; moralizing literature), and conclude: “Assistiamo così al dramma angoscioso dell’anima paterna stretta dal dubbio di esser egli dinanzi a Dio, con le sue colpe, l’inconsapevole causa di quella morte; al suo buttarsi disperato nella preghiera, fino alla visione rassicuratrice e consolatrice, apparsagli in sogno, dell’anima serena del suo ‘doce [sic] figliuolo’. Sono pagine queste, verso la fine del caro libro di ricordi, che veramente non possono leggersi senza commozione, senza partecipazione profonda. Nè si potrà più dimenticare lo slancio di quel padre amorosissimo teso nel tentativo di abbracciare l’ombra vana della sua creatura, con un grido ch’è dell’anima: ‘Figliuolo mio! Alberto mio!’” (66; We are witnesses in this way to the distressing drama of the father’s soul, gripped by doubt and with all his sins facing God unaware of the causes of that death, his desperate launch into prayer, through the comforting and consoling vision that appeared to him in a dream of the serene soul of his ‘sweet son.’ These are pages that toward the end of this precious book of memories one truly cannot read without being moved, without participating to the most profound degree. Nor can one ever forget the burst of enthusiasm from that most loving father, straining in his attempt to embrace the empty shade of his child with a cry that comes from his soul, ‘My son! My Albert!’). My sympathies in Giovanni Morelli’s regard are decidedly more circumspect, as I shall presently show. 20 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 172. 21 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 57–8. 22 The original appears in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 5.2, Buccolicum Carmen XIV, in both Latin and Italian, pp. 858–77; the English translation is by Janet Levarie Smarr, Eclogues (New York: Garland, 1987), 252. 23 In this case, the impetus for writing (self-consolation) would be similar to the one that various scholars have speculated prompted the writing of

Notes to page 155

221

another work by Boccaccio: Il Corbaccio. Among the critics who suggest that this work is Boccaccio’s confession and self-consolation for a love or lust interest that ultimately left him profoundly ashamed, see Anthony K. Cassell’s introduction to his English translation of Il Corbaccio, The Corbaccio or The Labyrinth of Love (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 1993 [1975]), as well as the contributions of Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger and F. Regina Psaki (Chapel Hill: Annali d’Italianistica, 2006). 24 The text of the original, as well as the English translation, here and following are from Petrarch’s Testament, ed. and trans. Theodor E. Mommsen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957). This passage appears on pp. 68–9. 25 La Vita del Petrarca (Life of Petrarch) by Giovan Andrea Gesualdo appeared in Angelo Solerti’s collection Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo decimosesto (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1904). The original appears on p. 419, and the English translation is mine. Further references appear in the text. See also Petrarch’s Sen. 3.7, “A Nerium Morandum foroliviensem, de fama mortis sue sepius conficta et figmenti causis” (“To Neri Morando of Forlì, on the rumor of his [own] death which is quite often fabricated and invented” [Venice, 25 April 1363]), in Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII), trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 103: “De qua re amicus ille tunc noster, non mali vir ingenii sed vagi, carmen illud flebile texuit quod audisti: qui, ut vides, me ad ipsam quam deflevit mortem incertum quo spatio antecessit. Ceterum carmen ipsum et vulgaris rumor sic ora omnium auresque compleverat eoque processum erat, ut me reducem quasi umbram defuncti hominis admirantes dubitantesque conspicerent vixque oculis crederent cuius contrarium auribus credidissent; fueruntque in eo prestigio nonnulli qui, Thome in morem, non me prius vivum crederent quam manibus attrectassent et, ceu prodigium aut fantasma complexi, corpus solidum comperissent. Sic vix tandem primus auditus visui ac tactui et contrario cessit auditui” (“That friend of ours at the time, a man of considerable talent, but erratic, composed that plaintive ode about the event, which you heard. As you see, he has gone before me, I know not by how much time, to the very death which he had bewailed for me. But the poem itself and the general rumor spread about on every mouth and into every ear, had such success that people viewed me upon my return with amazement and doubt, as if I were a dead man’s ghost. They could scarcely believe their eyes, having believed their ears to the contrary. During that hocus-pocus, there

222

26

27

28

29

30

Notes to pages 156–7

were several who, like Thomas, did not believe that I was alive until they had touched me with their hands; and embracing me as though I were a miracle or a ghost, they discovered a solid body. Thus, finally, what they had previously heard barely gave way to sight and to touch and to hearing the opposite”). Armando Maggi, “To Write as Another: The Testament,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 333–4. Petrarch’s Testament, 72–5. Even after making these many hypothetical plans, Petrarch included a further proviso: “Seu ubicumque terrarum alibi in loco fratrum minorum, si sit ibi; sin minus, in quacumque alia ecclesia, que vicinior fuerit loco mortis.” (“if, though, [I should die] anywhere else, [I wish to be buried] in a church of the Franciscans if there should be one; if not, in some other church in the neighbourhood of the place of my death,” 74–5). See McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism, 61, where he summarizes: “Petrarch certainly had seen the specter of death many times in his life: this is quite evident in the despairing letters and verse of 1348–49, when he lost Laura, Cardinal Colonna, and various other friends. Events of the 1360s only deepened his awareness of death’s physical and psychological presence. In 1361 he lost his son Giovanni and his ‘Socrates.’ In May of 1362 he wrote his lengthy Sen. 1.5 to Boccaccio, who was frightened over the prophecy of death. In 1363 the rumor of Petrarch’s own death began circulating, and, even worse, he lost his beloved friends ‘Laelius’ and ‘Simonides’ … Petrarch seems to be contemplating his old age: ‘For us now the sole task is to be firm against the terrors and blows of sorrow, because the contrary, namely, either anxious hope or unbridled happiness, offers no threat to us these days.’ Should Petrarch die, only his Boccaccio now remains to be caretaker of his works in progress. Clearly Petrarch is increasingly looking toward a lonely senescence, looking toward the end of his life.” See David Thompson, A Humanist among Princes: An Anthology of Petrarch’s Letters (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 1, where he noted that the inspiration for Petrarch’s epistle is Ovid’s Tristia IV, 10, but it is clear that Petrarch’s work demonstrates uniqueness and innovation with respect to his model. For the Epistola posteritati, I cite both the Latin original and English translation by Karl Enenkel from Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance with a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 256–7. Giuseppe Mazzotta provides a masterful reading of the letter’s tone in the second appendix,

Notes to pages 158–61

31

32

33 34

223

“Ambivalences of Power,” of his monograph The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 181–92, rightly describing it as “self-consciously posthumous” (182). There is at least one instance in which one of Petrarch’s dead addressees seemed to answer him. The conspirator in the exchange was identified as Pietro da Muglio, a professor at the University of Bologna, who once wrote Petrarch in the voice of Homer. See Roberto Weiss, “Notes on Petrarch and Homer,” Rinascimento 4 (1953): 263–75. It is clear that Petrarch nevertheless envisioned his Familiares addressed to the dead as an outlet for his own views or “laments,” as he states in Familiares 24.3 to Cicero: “Unum hoc vicissim a vera caritate profectum non iam consilium sed lamentum audi, ubicunque es, quod unus posterorum, tui nominis amantissimus, non sine lacrimis fundit. O inquiete semper atque anxie, vel ut verba tua recognoscas, o preceps et calamitose senex, quid tibi tot contentionibus et prorsum nichil profuturis simultatibus voluisti? Ubi et etati et professioni et fortune tue conveniens otium reliquisti?” I am citing from Le Familiari, vol. 13 of the Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Florence: Sansoni, 1942), 226; the following English translation is by Aldo S. Bernardo, Letters on Familiar Matters. Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XXIV (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 317: “Now it is your turn, wherever you may be, to hearken not to advice but to a lament inspired by true love from one of your descendants who dearly cherishes your name, a lament addressed to you not without tears. O wretched and distressed spirit, or to use your own words, O rash and ill-fated elder, why did you choose to become involved in so many quarrels and utterly useless feuds? Why did you forsake that peaceful ease so befitting a man of your years, your profession, and your fate?”) In De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, Petrarch admits, “Verum ego, laboriosam michi et quibus minime suspicabar inuidiosam fame sarcinam perosus … fesso nil dulcius est quiete. Hanc michi semper ad hunc diem mendax, ut nunc audio, literarum fama preripuit” (“I detest the laborious burden of fame, which arouses envy in those I least suspected. [and …] nothing is sweeter to the weary than rest. Such rest has been stolen from me by a literary reputation that is false, as I now learn.” I cite the original and English translation from Petrarch’s Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). I cite the original from Le senili, ed. Guido Martellotti (Turin: Einaudi, 1976 [Milan: Ricciardi, 1955]), 64. Thompson, A Humanist among Princes, 220.

224

Notes to pages 161–3

35 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992 [1956]), 695. 36 Today habeas corpus has come to include the legal safeguard of individuals against arbitrary state actions, including secret rendition and torture. Early Italian eidolopoeia addressed a range of issues concerning dead bodies, issues that were deeply imbued with the rhetoric of power and, at least in the most complex stories discussed in chapters 2 and 3, with state-level actions. 37 Epithets can even seem to be interpretations or re-presentations of identities imposed by another on the deceased. 38 “Apophrades, or the return of the dead; I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead return to reinhabit the houses in which they had lived. The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.” Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1973]), 15–16. 39 STTL, as it was oftentimes abbreviated, was a common prayer or blessing of ancient Romans on behalf of the deceased.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. – Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale. Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Ahern, John. “What Did the First Copies of the Comedy Look Like?” In Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. 1–15. Alexander, Gavin. “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure.” In Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 97–112. Alexandri, Alexandro de. Dies geniales. Rome: Iacobi Mazothii, 1522. Alighieri, Dante. La comedia di Dante Alighieri. Ed. Cristoforo Berardi da Pesaro. Venice: Windelin of Speyer, 1477. – La comedia di Dante Alighieri. Ed. Cristoforo Landino. Florence: Nicolo di Lorenzo della Magna, 1481. – Commedia di Dante Alighieri insieme con uno dialogo circa el sito, forma et misure dello Inferno. Ed. Girolamo Benivieni. Florence: Filippo di Giunta, 1506. – Dante’s Vita Nuova. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. – The Divine Comedy. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. – The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Notes by Ronald L. Martinez. 3 vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011. – La monarchia di Dante Allighieri con volgarizzamento di Marsilio Ficino. Ed. Alessandro Torri. Livorno: Tipi degli Artisti, 1844. – Opere minori. Vol. 1.1. Vita nuova. Rime. Ed. Domenico de Robertis and Gianfranco Contini. Milan: Ricciardi, 1995.

226

Bibliography

– The Purgatorio. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: New American Library, 1961. – Le terze rime di Dante: Lo ’nferno e ’l Purgatorio e ’l Paradiso. Ed. Pietro Bembo. Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1502. Allan, Mowbray. “Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation?” MLN: Modern Language Notes 104 (1989): 193–205. Altamura, Antonio. “Donato da Casentino: un volgarizzamento trecentesco del De mulieribus claris del Boccaccio (estratti da un codice inedito).” Atti e memorie della Reale Accademia Petrarca di lettere, atti e scienze 25 (1938): 265–71. Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Early Medicean Devices.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 122–43. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. A Collection of Ancient Texts. Ed. and trans. George Luck. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa. Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, ed. Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori. Fiesole: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003. Ariès, Philippe. Essais sur la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando furioso. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Arlotto, Piovano. Motti e facezie. Ed. Gianfranco Folena. Milan: Ricciardi, 1995. Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence. Ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. – “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes His Readers. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 2010. Auerbach, Erich. Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1929. – Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Ed. Theodore Silverstein. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. – Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: A. Brancke Verlag, 1946. – Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Balducci, Marino Alberto. Rinascimento e anima. Petrarca, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso: Spirito e materia oltre i confini del messaggio dantesco. Florence: Le Lettere, 2006. Bandiera, Giulietta. Guida insolita ai misteri, ai segreti, alle leggende, alle curiosità e ai luoghi dell’Italia degli angeli. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2000.

Bibliography 227 Barański, Zygmunt G. “Chiosar con altro testo”. Leggere Dante nel Trecento. Florence: Cadmo, 2001. Barbi, Michele. Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI. Pisa: Tipografia T. Nistri E.C., 1890. Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. – Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. – “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.” In Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. – The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Baron, Hans. “Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 22 (1938): 84–97. – The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Barthes, Roland. Litérature et réalité. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Bartolini, Agostino. Dante e Ravenna. Rome: L. Ricca & Co., 1914. Batini, Giorgio. Italia a mezzanotte: Storie di fantasmi, castelli e tesori. Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1968. Battaglia Ricci, Lucia. Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale. Pisa: Giardini, 1988. Bellomo, Saverio. “Prime vicende del sepolcro di Dante.” Letture Classensi 28 (1999): 55–71. – “Il sorriso di Ilaro.” Studi sul Boccaccio 32 (2004): 201–35. Belsey, Catherine. “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.1 (2010): 1–27. Benivieni, Antonio, il Giovane. Vita di Girolamo Benivieni. Archivio Leonetti Mannucci Gianni. Codice 43. cart. XVI ex. 72 folios. Archivio di Stato, Florence. Benivieni, Girolamo. “Cantico in laude di Dante.” In Commedia di Dante Alighieri insieme con uno dialogo circa el sito, forma et misure dello Inferno. Florence: Filippo di Giunta, 1506. – Commento di Hieronymo Benivieni a più sue canzone et sonetti dello Amore et della Belleza Divina. Florence: Antonio Tubini, Lorenzo (de Alopo) Veneziano e Andrea Ghirlandi, 1500. – Opere. Florence: Filippo di Giunta, 1519. Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

228

Bibliography

Bergin, Thomas G. Boccaccio. New York: Viking Press, 1981. Bernardo, Aldo S. Petrarch, Scipio and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962. Bertoni, Giulio. L’“Orlando furioso” e la Rinascenza a Ferrara. Modena: Umberto Orlandini, 1919. Bigi, Emilio. Forme e significati nella “Divina Commedia”. Bologna: Cappelli, 1981. Billanovich, Giuseppe. “La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio: Dalla lettera di Ilaro al Trattatello in laude di Dante.” Studi Danteschi 28 (1949): 45–144. Biow, Douglas. Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1973]. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Corbaccio or The Labyrinth of Love. Trans. Anthony K. Cassell. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 1993 [1975]. – Decameron. Ed. Vittore Branca. Turin: Einaudi, 1987 [1980]. – The Decameron. Trans. Guido Waldman. Intro. and notes Jonathan Usher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. – Eclogues. Trans. Janet Levarie Smarr. New York: Garland, 1987. – Famous Women. Ed. and trans. Virginia Brown. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. – The Fates of Illustrious Men. Trans. Louis Brewer Hall. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1965. – The Life of Dante (Trattatello in Laude di Dante). Trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino. New York: Garland, 1990. – Le opere de misser Giovanni Boccaccio De mulieribus claris. Ed. Vincenzo Bagli. Venice: Zuanne de Trino, 1506. – Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Ed. Vittore Branca et al. 10 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1964–98. Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism. Ed. Thomas C. Stillinger and F. Regina Psaki. Chapel Hill: Annali d’Italianistica, 2006. Boli, Todd. “Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante or Dante resartus.” Renaissance Quarterly 41.3 (Autumn 1988): 379–412. Bonanno, Danilo. La perdita e il ritorno: Presenze cavalcantiane nell’ultimo Dante. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1999. Boyde, Patrick. Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. – Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s “Comedy”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Bibliography 229 – Passion and Perception in Dante’s “Commedia”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke. Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Braden, Gordon, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Branca, Vittore. Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. I. Un primo elenco dei codici e tre studi. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1958. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977. Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: HarperCollins, 1996. Brown, Alison. “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought.” Journal of Modern History 58:2 (1986): 383–413. – “Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Moses: A Changing Model.” In Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. Peter Denley and Caroline Elam. London: Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies. 2:57–72. Brown, Peter. The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Brown, Peter, ed. Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Intro. A.C. Spearing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brownlee, Kevin. “Phaeton’s Fall and Dante’s Ascent.” Dante Studies 102 (1984): 135–44. Bruni, Leonardo. History of the Florentine People. Ed. and trans. James Hankins. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–7. – Laudatio Florentine Urbis. Ed. Stefano U. Baldassarri. Florence: SISMEL, 2000. – Opere letterarie e politiche. Ed. Paolo Viti. Turin: UTET, 1996. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989 [1860]. Burgio, Anna Ceruti. “Strutture narrative e modelli culturali del Peregrino di Iacopo Caviceo.” Aurea Parma: Rivista di Storia, Letteratura e Arte 62 (1978): 42–54. Burton, Richard. The Kingdom of Darkness: Or the History of Daemons, Specters, Witches, Apparitions, Possessions, Disturbances, and other Wonderful and Supernatural Delusions, Mischievous Feats, and Malicious Impostures of the Devil. London: Nath. Crouch, 1688. Butterfield, Andrew. “Monument and Memory in Early Renaissance Florence.” In Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni

230

Bibliography

Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 135–60. Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Byron, [George Gordon, Lord]. The Works of Lord Byron. Poetry. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 4. London and New York: John Murray/Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. – “Spirits Seeking Bodies: Death, Possession, and Communal Memory in the Middle Ages.” In Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989. 66–86. Calmet, Dom Augustine. Treatise on Vampires & Revenants: The Phantom World. Dissertation on those Persons who Return to Earth Bodily, the Excommunicated, the Oupires or Vampires, Vroucolacas, & c. Trans. Henry Christmas. Ed. Clive Leatherdale. Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993 [1850]. Cambon, Nella Doria. Il convegno celeste. Turin: Fratelli Bocca Editore, 1933. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Ed. Jill Kraye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1996]. Camporeale, Salvatore I. “Giovanni Caroli, 1460–1480: Death, Memory, and Transformation.” In Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. 16–27. Canfora, Davide. La controversia di Poggio Bracciolini e Guarino Veronese su Cesare e Scipione. Florence: Olschki, 2001. Carbone, Ludovico. “Oratio habita in funere praestantissimi oratoris et poetae Guarini Veronensis.” In Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin. Milan: Ricciardi, 1952. 382–417. Cardini, Roberto. La critica del Landino. Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Cardoni, Gasparo Martinetti. Dante Alighieri in Ravenna: Memorie storiche con documenti. Ravenna: Gaetani Angeletti, 1864. Carpetto, George M. The Humanism of Matteo Palmieri. Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Carroll, John S. Prisoners of Hope. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Cavalcanti, Giovanni. Della carcere dell’ingiusto esilio e del trionfal ritorno di Cosimo Padre della patria. Florence: Magheri, 1821.

Bibliography 231 Caviceo, Jacopo. Il Peregrino. Ed. Luigi Vignali. Rome: La Fenice, 1993. Cestaro, Gary P. “Queering Nature, Queering Gender: Dante and Sodomy.” In Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. 90–103. Chamberlin, E.R. The Bad Popes. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. Christian, William A. Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Ciccarese, Maria Pia, ed. Visioni dell’aldilà in occidente: Fonti, modelli, testi. Florence: Nardini, 1987. Closson, Marianne. L’imaginaire démoniaque en France (1550–1650): Genèse de la littérature fantastique. Geneva: Droz, 2000. Cobb, Noel. “A Little Lesson in ‘Counter-Education’: A Dialogue with the Ghost of Ficino on the Theme of Psychotherapy.” In Friend to Mankind: Marsilio Ficino, 1433–1499. London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1999. 181–93. Cohen, Kathleen. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Cohn, Samuel Kline. Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Colilli, Paul. “Harold Bloom and the Post-Theological Dante.” Annali d’Italianistica 8 (1990): 132–43. Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Ed. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele. 2 vols. Milan: Adelphi, 1998. Colonna, Stefano. I sonetti, le canzoni, et i triomphi di M. Laura in risposta di M. Francesco Petrarca per le sue rime in vita, et dopo la morte di lei. San Luca: Segno del Diamante, 1552. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic. Ed. Claire Fanger. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Contini, Gianfranco. Un’idea di Dante: Saggi danteschi. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. – Varianti e altra linguistica: Una raccolta di saggi. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Costa, Elio. “From Locus Amoris to Infernal Pentecost: The Sin of Brunetto Latini.” Quaderni d’Italianistica 10.1–2 (1989): 109–32. Cox, Virginia. “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Late Medieval Italy.” In The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition, ed. Virginia Cox and John O. Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 109–43. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row, 1953 [Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: A. Francke AG Verlag, 1948]. Da Bisticci, Vespasiano. Le vite. Ed. Aulo Greco. 2 vols. Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970–6.

232

Bibliography

Daniels, Rhiannon. Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy, 1340–1520. London and Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2009. Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. Dante for the New Millennium. Ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Dante Metamorphoses: Episodes in a Literary Afterlife. Ed. Eric G. Haywood. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton. Ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 1983. Davies, Owen. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Davis, Charles. “Two Early Statements about Michelangelo Not in SteinmannWittkower.” FONTES 42. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/ volltexte/2009/840/, 4. Davis, Colin. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. De Marini, Giuseppe. Lo spirito dell’Abate Parini colto all’altro mondo dall’ombra dell’A. Pietro Metastasio è presentato a quelle dell’Ariosto, del Tasso, Tassoni, Petrarca, Dante, ed altri rinomati poeti italiani. Ossia lo stato attuale in cui si trovano i Poeti e la Poesia. Milan: Gerolamo Rossi, 1799. De Robertis, Domenico. Editi e rari. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. De’ Nerli, Filippo. Commentarj dei fatti civili corsi dentro la città di Firenze dall’anno 1215 al 1537. Trieste: Colombo Coen, 1859. The Death and Resurrection of the Author? Ed. William Irwin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. degli Agostini, Giovanni. Notizie istorico-critiche intorno la vita, e le opere degli scrittori viniziani. 2 vols. Venice: Simone Occhi, 1754. Del Lungo, Isidoro. Florentia. Uomini e cose del Quattrocento. Montepulciano: Le Balze, 2002 [Florence: Barbèra, 1897]. del Principe, Davide. Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Delcorno, Carlo. Exemplum e letteratura tra medioevo e rinascimento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989.

Bibliography 233 della Barba, Pompeo. Spositione d’un sonetto platonico, fatto sopra il Primo effecto d’Amore, che è il separare l’anima dal corpo de l’Amante, dove si tratta de la immortalità de l’anima secondo Aristotile, e secondo Platone. Florence: L. Torrentino, 1554. Della scoperta delle ossa di Dante: Relazione con documenti. Per cura del Municipio di Ravenna. Ravenna: Gaetano Angeletti, 1870. Della Terza, Dante. “Canto XV: The Canto of Brunetto Latini.” Trans. Charles Ross. In Lectura Dantis Inferno: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 197–212. Derrida, Jacques. Donnet le mort. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1999. – The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. – Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. – Spectres de Marx. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1993. Di Benedetto, Sergio. “Girolamo Benivieni e la questione della lingua: Alcune considerazioni sulle correzioni al Commento del 1500.” ACME: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Milano 63.1 (2010): 165–203. Dionisotti, Carlo. “Dante nel Quattrocento.” In Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi, ed. Società Dantesca Italiana e dell’Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana. Florence: G.C. Sansoni Editore, 1965. 333–78. Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989. Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1925– . Domenichi, Lodovico. Historia di detti, e fatti degni di memoria di diversi principi e huomini private antichi et moderni. Venice: Gabriel Giolito De Ferrari, 1557. Dorez, Leon. “La mort de Pic de la Mirandole et l’édition Aldine des oeuvres d’Ange Politien (1494–1497).” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 32 (1898): 360–4. Doty, Mark. “Rooting for the Damned.” In The Poet’s Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 370–9. Dreyer, Peter. “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481.’” Print Quarterly 1 (1984): 111–15. Dufallo, Basil. The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to the Principate. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. The Earliest Lives of Dante Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino. Trans. James Robinson Smith. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1901].

234

Bibliography

Durling, Robert M. The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Ebeling, Gerhard. Word and Faith. Trans. James W. Leitch. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963. Eire, Carlos M.N. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ellis, Steven. Dante and English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Erasmo, Mario. Reading Death in Ancient Rome. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Erizzo, Sebastiano. Le sei giornate. Ed. Lodovico Dolce. Venice: Giovan Varisco, e compagni, 1567. Ethopoiia. La représentation de caractères entre fiction scolaire et réalité vivante à l’époche impériale et tardive. Ed. Eugenio Amato and Jacques Schamp. Salterno: Helios, 2005. European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Fabbri, Lorenzo. “The Memory of Exiled Families: The Case of the Strozzi.” In Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 253–61. Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices. Ed. Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Ethan Matt Kavaler. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Faivre, Antoine. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. Ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Favati, Guido. Inchiesta sul dolce stil nuovo. Florence: Le Monnier, 1975. Fedalto, Giorgio. Le porte del cielo: Il Cristianesimo e i segni dell’aldilà, apparizioni, visioni, testimoni. Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2002. Fedi, Roberto. “Soli e pensosi: Censura, parodia, fortuna di un sonetto petrarchesco (RVF XXXV).” Lingua e stile 26 (September 1991): 465–81. Felton, D. Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Ferguson, Francis. Dante’s Drama of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Ficino, Marsilio. “De Raptu Pauli.” In Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin. Milan: Riccardi, 1952. 932–69. Field, Arthur. “Cristoforo Landino’s First Lectures on Dante.” Renaissance Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1986): 16–48.

Bibliography 235 – The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Filelfo, Francesco. “Prose e poesie volgari di Francesco Filelfo.” Ed. Giovanni Benaducci. Atti e memorie della Reale Deputazione di storia patria per le provincie delle Marche 5 (1901), xli–262. Finucane, Ronald C. Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts. London: Junction Books, 1982. Foà, Simona. “Il Dialogo sul sito, forma, e misure dell’inferno di Girolamo Benivieni e un particolare aspetto dell’esegesi dantesca tra XV e XVI secolo.” In Dante e il locus inferni: Creazione letteraria e tradizione interpretativa, ed. Simona Foà and Sonia Gentili. Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. 179–90. Franco, Nicolo. Le pistole vulgari. Venice: Antonio Gardane, 1539. Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Frati, Ludovico, and Corrado Ricci. Il sepolcro di Dante: Documenti raccolti. Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1969 [Bologna: Romagnoli, 1889]. Frazier, Alison Knowles. Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny.” In Collected Papers, trans. Joan Rivière. 5 vols. 1923–50. New York: Basic Books, 1959. 4:368–407. Fubini, Riccardo. L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Garber, Marjorie B. Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. – Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Routledge, 1987. Gardiner, Eileen. Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante. New York: Italica Press, 1989. Garin, Eugenio. “Dante nel Rinascimento.” Rinascimento 7 n.s. (1967): 3–28. Geary, Patrick J. Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gerhard, Mira. “Sacrificing Virgil.” In Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 107–19. Gerosa, Pietro Paolo. Umanesimo cristiano del Petrarca: Influenza agostiniana attinenze medievali. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1966. Giannetto, Nella. Bernardo Bembo umanista e politico veneziano. Florence: Olschki, 1985.

236

Bibliography

Gilbert, Allan H. Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962. Gilson, Simon. Dante and Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ginsberg, Warren. Chaucer’s Italian Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Ginzburg, Carlo. Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. New York: Penguin, 1983. Giubileo per la scoperta delle Ossa di Dante Alighieri e sottoscrizione mondiale per erigere a lui un mausoleo a Ravenna. Ed. Claudio Zirardini. Ravenna: Unione Tipografica Editrice Cooperativa, 1894. Giuliani, Giambattista. Nella solenne deposizione delle ritrovate ossa di Dante nell’antico loro sepolcro. Genoa: La donna e la famiglia, 1865. Gobi, Jean. Dialogue avec un fantôme. Trans. Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994. Godorecci, Barbara J. After Machiavelli: “Re-writing” and the “Hermeneutic Attitude”. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Gori, Pietro. Le feste fiorentine attraverso i secoli. Le feste per san Giovanni. Florence: Bemporad & Figlio, 1926. Gorni, Guglielmo. Guido Cavalcanti: Dante e il suo “primo amico”. Rome: Aracne, 2009. Graf, Arturo. Miti, leggende e superstizioni del Medio Evo. Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1892. Grafton, Anthony. “Reforming the Dream.” In Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Grouwens. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 271–92. – “Traditions of Conversion: Descartes and His Devil.” Occasional Papers Series 22. Berkeley: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California at Berkeley, 2000. Gragnolati, Manuele. Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Greco, Luigi. “La difesa di Dante di G. Benivieni.” Giornale dantesco 5 n.s. (1897): 509–18. Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. – Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Bibliography 237 – Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Grendler, Marcella T. The “Trattato politico-morale” of Giovanni Cavalcanti (1381–c. 1451). A Critical Edition and Interpretation. Geneva: Droz, 1973. Griffin, Clive. “Giacomo Caviceo’s Libro del Peregrino: The Fate of an Italian Wanderer in Spain.” In Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Conor Fahy, ed. Anna Laura Lepschy, John Took, and Dennis E. Rhodes. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986. 132–46. Grosse, Henning. Magica, seu mirabilium historiarum De Spectris et apparitionibus spirituum. 2 vols. Eisleben: Henningi Grossi, 1597. Gruppioni, Giorgio. “Dantis Ossa: Una ricognizione delle ricognizioni dei resti di Dante.” In Dante e la fabbrica della “Commedia”, ed. Alfredo Cottignoli et al. Atti del convegno internazionale (Ravenna, 14–16 September 2006). Ravenna: Longo, 2008. 255–67. Guerra D’Antoni, Francesca. Dante’s Burning Sands: Some New Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Guidi, Remo L. La morte nell’età umanistica. Vicenza: LIEF, 1983. Hankins, James. “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 118–41. Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. – “The Ghost of Guido Cavalcanti, Revisited.” In Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2003. 119–29. Hatfield, Rab. “Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola and the Millennium.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 88–114. Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988. Hieatt, Constance B. The Realism of Dream Visions: The Poetic Exploration of the Dream Experience in Chaucer and His Contemporaries. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967. Hollander, Robert. Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Holloway, Julia Bolton. Twice Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

238

Bibliography

Holmes, George. The Florentine Enlightenment 1400–50. London: Wedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. Houston, Jason M. Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as “Dantista”. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Hutton, Edward. Giovanni Boccaccio: A Biographical Study. London: John Lane, 1910. Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art. Ed. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Indizio, Giuseppe. “L’episola di Ilaro: Un contributo sistemico.” Studi danteschi 71 (2006): 191–263. Jacobelli, Jader. Quei due Pico della Mirandola: Giovanni e Gianfrancesco. Rome: Laterza, 1993. Jacobs, Naomi. The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Jacoff, Rachel. “Charles Eliot Norton’s ‘Medicean Dante.’” Harvard Literary Bulletin n.s. 5.3 (1994): 45–52. Jannaco, Carmine. “I ‘Ricordi’ di Giovanni Morelli.” Città di vita 20 (1957): 64–6. Janson, Tore. Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions. Stockholm: Ivar Haeggstroms Tryckeri, 1964. Jenaro-MacLennan, L. The Trecento Commentaries on the “Divina Commedia” and the Epistle to Cangrande. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Johnston, Sarah Iles. Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Joynes, Andrew, ed. Medieval Ghost Stories. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001. Kallendorf, Craig. In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989. Kay, Richard. Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. Kennedy, William J. Authorizing Petrarch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Kent, Dale. “Michele del Giogante’s House of Memory.” In Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 110–36. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [1966]. Kimmelman, Burt. The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. King, Ed. “Saving Virgil.” In Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 83–106.

Bibliography 239 Kircher, Timothy. “Alberti in Boccaccio’s Garden: After-Dinner Thoughts on Moral Philosophy.” In Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Grouwens. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 171–95. Kirkpatrick, Robin. The European Renaissance 1400–1600. Harlow: Pearson, 2002. Kolsky, Stephen. The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1971. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters. 4 vols. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956–96. Landino, Cristoforo. Scritti critici e teorici. Ed. Roberto Cardini. 2 vols. Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Landon, William J. Politics, Patriotism, and Language: Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Secular Patria” and the Creation of an Italian National Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Landucci, Luca. Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542. Ed. Iodoco del Badia. Florence: Sansoni, 1883. Latini, Brunetto. Il Tesoretto (The Little Treasure). Ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway. New York: Garland, 1981. Lausberg, Heinrich, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton. Ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Lavater, Ludwig. Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght. London: Henry Benneyman for Richard Watkyns, 1572. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. London: Scolar, 1984. – The Medieval Imagination. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Lederer, David. “Living with the Dead: Ghosts in Early Modern Bavaria.” In Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards. Kirksville, MO: Truman State Univeristy Press, 2002. 25–53. Ledos, E.G. “Lettre inédite de Cristoforo Landino à Bernardo Bembo.” Bibliotheque L’École de Chartes 54 (1893): 721–4. Lehner, Ernst, and Johanna Lehner. Devils, Demons, Death and Damnation. Dover Pictorial Archive Series. New York: Dover, 1971. Lentzen, Manfred. “Le lodi di Firenze di Cristoforo Landino.” Romanische Forschungen 97.1 (1985): 36–46. Leonarde’s Ghost: Popular Piety and “The Appearance of a Spirit” in 1628. Trans. Kathryn A. Edwards and Susie Speakman Sutch. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.

240

Bibliography

Leporatti, Roberto. “Canzone e sonetti di Girolamo Benivieni fiorentino: Edizione critica.” Interpres: Rivista di studi quattrocenteschi 27 (2008): 144–298. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Lillie, Amanda. “Memory of Place: Luogo and Lineage in the Fifteenth-Century Florentine Countryside.” In Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 195–214. Looney, Dennis. Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. – “Ferrarese Studies: Tracking the Rise and Fall of an Urban Lordship in the Renaissance.” In Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara, ed. Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. 1–23. Lucas-Dubreton, Jean. Daily Life in Florence in the Time of the Medici. Trans. A. Lytton Sells. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Luzzi, Joseph. Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Lynch, Kathryn L. The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy and Literary Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Clizia, Andria, Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua. Ed. Giorgio Inglese. Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. – Letters of Machiavelli. Ed. and trans. Allen H. Gilbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. – Opere letterarie. Ed. Luigi Blasucci. Milan: Adelphi, 1964. – Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie di Niccolò Machiavelli. Ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella. Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1929. Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. Trans. and notes William Harris Stahl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Maggi, Armando. In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. – Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Malaparte, Curzio. Maladetti Toscani. Florence: Vallecchi, 1956. Malipiero, Girolamo. See Maripietro, Girolamo. Manetti, Antonio. Dialogo di Antonio di Tuccio Manetti cittadino fiorentino circa al sito, forma et misure dello Inferno. Ed. Nicola Zingarelli. Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1897. – The Fat Woodworker. Trans. with intro and notes by Robert L. Martone and Valerie Martone. New York: Italica Press, 1991.

Bibliography 241 – La novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo. Ed. Paolo Procaccioli. Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo/Ugo Guanda, 1990. – Operette istoriche edite ed inedite di Antonio Manetti matematico ed architetto fiorentino del secolo XV. Ed. Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1887. Manetti, Giannozzo. Biographical Writings. Ed. and trans. Stefano U. Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Maripietro, Girolamo. Il Petrarcha spirituale. Venice: Marcolino da Forli, 1536. Marsh, David. Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Martelli, Mario. Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento: Il filtro degli anni sessanta. Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Masera, G. “La scienza e prescienza nei dannati dell’Inferno dantesco e nelle grandi ombre dell’Eneide.” Il giornale dantesco 26.4 (1923): 354–7. Massetani, G. La dottrina filosofica nella canzone d’amore di Girolamo Benivieni. Livorno: A. Debatte, 1904. Mazzini, Giuseppe. Opere. Milan: Carlo Aliprandi, 1887. Mazzoni, Francesco. “Il culto di Dante nell’Ottocento e la Società Dantesca Italiana.” Studi danteschi 71 (2006): 335–59. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the “Divine Comedy”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. – Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. – The Worlds of Petrarch. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. McClure, George W. The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. – Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. McLaughlin, M.L. “Histories of Literature in the Quattrocento.” In The Language and Literature in Renaissance Italy, ed. Peter Hainsworth, Valerio Lucchesi, Christina Roaf, David Robey, and J.R. Woodhouse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 63–80. Meltzoff, Stanley. Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola: Theologica Poetica and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano. Florence: Olschki, 1987. Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra medioevo e rinascimento. Paolo da Certaldo, Giovanni Morelli, Bonaccorso Pitti, et al. Ed. Vittore Branca. Milan: Rusconi, 1986. Miglio, Massimo. “Boccaccio biografo.” In Boccaccio in Europe: Proceedings of the Boccaccio Conference, Louvain, December 1975, ed. Gilbert Tournoy. Louvain: Leuvan University Press, 1977. 149–64.

242

Bibliography

Milanesi, Gaetano. “Scrittura di artisti italiani del secolo XIV al XVII.” Archivio Storico Italiano ser. 3, vol. 19.1 (1874). Milani, Marisa. Streghe, morti ed esseri fantastici nel veneto oggi. Università di Padova Corso di letteratura delle tradizioni popolari. Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1990. Miller, James. “Introduction: Retheologizing Dante.” In Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 1–62. Minnis, Alistair J. The Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic and Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Missirini, Melchior. Delle memorie di Dante in Firenze e della gratitudine de’ Fiorentini verso il Divino Poeta. Florence: Tipografia Clasanziana, 1830. Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance with a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity”, ed. Karl Enenkel et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Monfasani, John. Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994. Montesano, Marina. “Fantasima, Fantasima che di notte vai”: La cultura magica nelle novelle toscane del Trecento. Rome: Città Nuova, 2000. Moorman, F.W. “The Pre-Shakespearean Ghost.” Modern Language Review 1.2 (1906): 85–95. Morgan, Alison. Dante and the Medieval Other World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Morici, Medardo. “Una visita clandestina alla tomba di Dante.” Il giornale dantesco 14.6 (1906): 279–81. Morsolin, M.E. Bernardo. “Un latinista del Cinquecento imitatore di Dante.” Atti del Reale Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti 7 (1893–4): 1429–46. Murphy, James J. “One Thousand Neglected Authors.” In Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 20–36. Murphy, Stephen. The Gift of Immortality: Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Najemy, John M. Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Niccoli, Ottavia. Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Rome: Laterza, 1987. – Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Bibliography 243 O’Callaghan, Michelle. Talking Politics: Tyranny, Parliament, and Christopher Brooke’s “The Ghost of Richard the Third” (1614). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. O’Connor, Mary Catherine. The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. Oldridge, Darren. Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds. London: Routledge, 2005. O’Meary, John. “Hamlet and the Fortunes of Sorrowful Imagination: A Reexamination of the Genesis and Fate of the Ghost.” Cahiers Elisabéthains 35.1 (1989): 15–26. Opere di Iacopo Sannazzaro con saggi dell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di Francesco Colonna e del Peregrino di Iacopo Caviceo. Ed. Enrico Carrara. Turin: UTET, 1952. Osgood, Charles G. Boccaccio on Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Mary M. Innes. New York: Penguin, 1955. Padoan, Giorgio. Il lungo cammino del “poema sacro.” Florence: Olschki, 1993. Palmieri, Matteo. Libro del poema chiamato Città di vita. Ed. Margaret Rooke. 2 vols. Northampton: Smith College, 1927–8. – Vita civile e De optimo cive di Bartolomeo Sacchi detto Il Platina. Ed. Felice Battaglia. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1944. – La vita di Niccolò Acciaioli. Ed. Alessandra Mita Ferraro. Naples: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 2001. Papini, Giovanni. Dante Vivo. Florence: Barbèra, Alfani e Venturi, 1933. – Dante Vivo. Trans. Eleanor Hammond Broadus and Anna Benedetti. New York: Macmillan, 1935. – La leggenda di Dante. Motti, facezie e tradizioni dei secoli XIV–XIX. Lanciano: Carabba, 1911. Parker, Deborah. Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Parodi, Ernesto. “La miscredenza di Guido Cavalcanti e una fonte del Boccaccio.” Bolletino della Società Dantesca 22 (1915): 37–47. Pasolini, Pier Desiderio. Ravenna e le sue grandi memorie: Ravenna Felix. Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1912. Pasquini, Emilio. “Riflessioni sulla genesi della Commedia.” In Dante e la fabbrica della “Commedia”, ed. Alfredo Cottignoli et al. Atti del convegno internazionale (Ravenna, 14–16 September 2006). Ravenna: Longo, 2008. 15–36. Passarini, Ludovico. Sepulcrum Dantis. Florence: Libreria Dante, 1883. Passerini, G.L. “Firenze e Trieste alla tomba di Dante.” Il giornale dantesco 16.5–6 (1908): 149–56.

244

Bibliography

Pellizzari, Achille. Dal Duecento all’Ottocento. Ricerche e studi letterari. Naples: F. Perrella E.C., 1914. Petrarca, Francesco. Le familiari. Ed. Vittorio Rossi. Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca 13. Florence: Sansoni, 1942. – Invectives. Ed. and trans. David Marsh. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. – Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII). Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. – Letters on Familiar Matters. Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XXIV. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. – My Secret Book. Trans. J.G. Nichols. Foreword Germaine Greer. London: Hesperus Press, 2002. – “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others.” In The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassierer et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. 47–133. – Petrarch’s Africa. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. – Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Facsimile edition of Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, Deposito Libreria Civica, manuscript BB.1.2.5. Introductory essay, translation, and notes by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. – Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. – Petrarch’s Testament. Ed. and trans. Theodor E. Mommsen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957. – Prose. Ed. G. Martellotti et al. Turin: Einaudi, 1976 [Milan: Ricciardi, 1955]. – Res seniles. Libri I–IV. Ed. Silvia Rizzo with Monica Berté. Florence: Le Lettere, 2003. – Le senili. Ed. Guido Martellotti. Trans. Giuseppe Fracassetti. Turin: Einaudi, 1976 [Milan: Ricciardi, 1955]. – Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi. Ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. – The Triumphs of Petrarch. Trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition. Ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Bibliography 245 Pettas, William Anthony. “The Giunti of Florence: Merchant Publishers of the Sixteenth Century.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1972. Pézard, André. Dante sous la pluie de feu (Enfer, chant XV). Paris: Vrin, 1950. Phillimore, Catherine Mary. Dante at Ravenna. London: Elliot Stock, 1898. Piacentini, Paola Scarcia. “Un fantasma umbro-marchegiano dell’400: Lucio di Visso.” Studi umanistici piceni 2 (1982): 233–52. Pieters, Jürgen. Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pite, Ralph. The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pitti, Jacopo. Dell’Istoria fiorentina. Archivio storico italiano. 1st ser. 1 (1842). The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Plett, Heinrich F. Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri. Ed. Carlo del Balzo. 14 vols. Rome: Forzani E.C., 1893–1908. The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses. Ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Poggioli, Renato. “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno.” PMLA 72.3 (1957): 313–58. Poliziano, Angelo. Silvae. Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 2004. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence 1494–1545. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pomponazzi, Pietro. Gli incantesimi. Ed. Cristiana Innocenti. Scandicci (Florence): La Nuova Italia, 1997. Porcacchi da Castiglione Arretino, Thomaso. Funerali antichi di diversi popoli et nationi; forma, ordine, et pompa di sepulture di esequie, di consecrationi antiche et d’altro. Venice: Simon Galignani de Karera, 1574. Porta, Francesco. La visione. Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1578. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Prendergast, Thomas A. Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus. New York: Routledge, 2004. Prosatori latini del Quattrocento. Ed. Eugenio Garin. Milan: Ricciardi, 1952. Prosatori volgari del Quattrocento. Ed. Claudio Varese. Milan: Ricciardi, 1955. Pugliese, Olga Zorzi. “Girolamo Benivieni: Umanista riformatore (dalla corrispondenza inedita).” Bibliofilia 72.3 (1970): 253–88.

246

Bibliography

Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Books 9–10. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Quondam, Amedeo. Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del classicismo. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1991. Rampton, Martha, “Up from the Dead: Magic and Miracle.” In Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 275–91. La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento. Ed. Sergio Zatti. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1998. Ratmoko, David R. On Spectrality: Fantasies of Redemption in the Western Canon. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Re, Caterina. Antonio Benivieni il giovane. Venice: Orfanotrofio di A. Pellizzato, 1905. – Girolamo Benivieni fiorentino: Cenni sulla vita e sulle opere. Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1906. – “La tomba di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e di Girolamo Benivieni in S. Marco di Firenze.” In In memoria di Oddone Ravenna. Padua: Fratelli Gallina, 1904. 108–41. Readings in Medieval Rhetoric. Ed. Joseph M. Miller, Michael H. Prosser, and Thomas W. Benson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Remy, Nicholas. Demonolatry. Ed. Montague Summers. Trans. E.A. Ashwin. 3 vols. London: J. Rodker, 1930. Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Renaissance Figures of Speech. Ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. Peter Mack. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition. Ed. Virginia Cox and John O. Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Ricci, Corrado. Il sepolcro e le ossa di Dante. Ravenna: Longo, 1977. – L’ultimo rifugio di Dante. 2nd ed. Milan: Hoepli, 1921. Ricci, Pier Giorgio. “Le tre redazioni del Trattatello in laude di Dante.” Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 197–214. Richardson, Brian. “The Cinquecento: Prose.” In The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 181–232. – Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bibliography 247 Riminesi, Giuseppe. Dante Alighieri e Ravenna Carme con note illustrative anche sul rinvenimento delle sacre ceneri. Ravenna: Gaetano Angeletti, 1865. Robey, David. “Dante and Modern American Criticism: Post-structuralism.” Annali d’Italianistica 8 (1990): 116–31. Rossi, Sergio. “Filippo De’ Nerli, Commentari de’ fatti civili occorsi nella città di Firenze dal 1215 al 1537. Edizione critica.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Naples, Federico II, 2005–6. Rossi, Vittorio. “Dante nel Trecento e nel Quattrocento.” In Scritti di critica letteraria. Saggi e discorsi su Dante. 3 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1930, 1:293–332. Roulier, Fernand. Jean Pic de la Mirandole (1463–1494), Humaniste, philosophe et théologien. Geneva: Slatkine, 1989. Roush, Sherry. “Dante as Piagnone Prophet: Girolamo Benivieni’s ‘Cantico in laude di Dante’ (1506).” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 49–80. – “Dante Ravennate and Boccaccio Ferrarese? Post-Mortem Residency and the Attack on Florentine Literary Hegemony, 1480–1520.” Viator 35 (2004): 543–62. – Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2002. – “Piagnone Exemplarity and the Florentine Literary Canon in the Vita di Girolamo Benivieni.” Quaderni d’Italianistica 27.1 (2006): 3–20. Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ruud, Jay. Critical Companion to Dante: A Literary Reference to His Life and Works. New York: Facts on File, 2008. Russell, J. Stephen. The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988. Ruvoldt, Maria. The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Saiber, Arielle. Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Salemi, Joseph. “Further Selections from Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae.” Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Literature 11 (1990): 38–58. Salvadori, Corinna. “Landmarks in the Fortunes of Dante in the Florentine Quattrocento.” In Dante Metamorphoses: Episodes in a Literary Afterlife, ed. Eric G. Haywood. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. 43–69. Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Ed. Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg. London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2000. Sanudo, Marin. I Diarii (1496–1533) Pagine scelte. Ed. Paolo Margaroli. Vicenza: Pozza Editore, 1997.

248

Bibliography

Sardi, Tommaso. “De anima peregrino: Poema di Fra Tommaso Sardi Domenicano del convento di Santa Maria Novella in Firenze.” Transcribed from the Magliabechian MS. I, 87, of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence with a preface by Margaret Rooke. Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 10.4 (July 1929). Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992 [1956]. Savonarola, Girolamo. Compendio di rivelazioni. Ed. Angela Crucitti. Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Girolamo Savonarola. Rome: Belardetti, 1974. 247–376. – Scelta di prediche e scritti di Fra Girolamo Savonarola con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita. Ed. P. Villari and E. Casanova. Florence: Sansoni, 1889. Scarpati, Claudio. “Note sulla fortuna editoriale del Boccaccio: I volgarizzamenti cinquecenteschi delle opere latine.” In Boccaccio in Europe, ed. Gilbert Tournoy. Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1977. 209–20. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. – Religione, folklore e società nell’Occidente medievale. Rome: Laterza, 1988. – Les revenants: Les vivants et les morts dans la sociétés médiévale. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Schulze, Thies. Dante Alighieri als nationales Symbol Italiens (1793–1915). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005. Schulze Altcappenberg, Hein-Thomas. Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2000. Scott, John A. Dante’s Political Purgatory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Scritture di scritture: Testi, generi, modelli nel Rinascimento. Ed. Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Michel Plaisance. Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Semprini, Giovanni. “Il Commento alla Canzone di Amore del Benivieni di Pico della Mirandola.” Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 14 (1922): 360–76. Setton, Kenneth M. The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571). 4 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976–84. Seung, T.K. Cultural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Shapiro, Marianne. Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Shumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Bibliography 249 Simona, Lorenza. Giacomo Caviceo: Uomo di chiesa, d’armi e di lettere. Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974. Singleton, Charles S. Dante Studies 1: Elements of Structure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Smith, Graham. The Stone of Dante and Later Florentine Celebrations of the Poet. Città di Castello: Olschki, 2000. Smith, James Robinson. The Earliest Lives of Dante Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1901]. Solerti, Angelo. Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo decimosesto. Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1904. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Specht, Henrik. “‘Ethopoeia’ or Impersonation: A Neglected Species of Medieval Characterization.” Chaucer Review 21.1 (1986): 1–15. Spitzer, Leo. “The Addresses to the Reader in the Commedia.” In Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–56. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1959. – “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors.” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22. Steinberg, Justin. Dante and the Limits of the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Steiner, George. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber and Faber, 1989. Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Stewart, Alan. Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Stillinger, Thomas. The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Stinger, Charles L. “Roman Humanist Images of Rome.” In Roma Capitale (1447–1527), ed. Sergio Gensini. Pisa: Pacini, 1994. 15–38. Storey, H. Wayne. “The Economies of Authority: Bembo Vellutello, and the Reconstruction of ‘Authentic Petrarch’.” In “Accessus ad Auctores”: Studies in Honor of Christopher Kleinhenz, ed. Fabian Alfie and Andrea Dini. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011. 493–506. Strocchia, Sharon T. Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

250

Bibliography

Strozzi, Lorenzo di Filippo. Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi. Florence: S. Landi, 1892. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Taillepied, Noel. A Treatise of Ghosts. Being the Psichologie, or Treatise upon Apparitions and Spirits, of Disembodied Souls, Phantom Figures, Strange Prodigies, and of Other Miracles and Marvels, which often presage the Death of some Great Person, or signify some swift Change in Public Affairs. Trans. Montague Summers. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company, 2006 [1616]. Tanturli, Giuliano. “Proposta e risposta: La prolusione petrarchesca del Landino e il Codice Cavalcantiano di Antonio Manetti.” Rinascimento 32 (1992): 213–25. Tartaro, Achille. “La prosa narrativa antica.” In La narrativa italiana dalle Origini ai giorni nostri, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. 43–140. Tasso, Torquato. Gerusalemme liberata. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Milan: Mondadori, 1979. Tenenti, Alberto. “Death in History: The Function and Meaning of Death in Florentine Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” In Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel et al. Trans. Valeria Finucci. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. 1–15. – Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento: Francia e Italia. Turin: Einaudi, 1977 [1957]. Tetel, Marcel, and Ronald G. Witt. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Third Omnibus of Crime. Ed. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1935. Thompson, C.J.S. The Mystery and Lore of Apparitions: With Some Account of Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms and Boggarts in Early Times. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931 [Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1974]. Thompson, David. A Humanist among Princes: An Anthology of Petrarch’s Letters. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. Ed. and trans. David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Thyraeus, Peter. De apparitionibus spirituum tractaus duo. Cologne: Gosuini Cholini, 1600. – Loca infesta: hoc est, De infestis, ob molestantes daemoniorvm et defvnctorvm hominvm spiritvs, locis, liber vnvs. Cologne: Gosuini Cholini, 1598. Torretta, Laura. “Il Liber de claris mulieribus di Giovanni Boccaccio: Parte III. I traduttori del Liber de claris mulieribus [and] Parte IV. I plagiari, gli imitatori,

Bibliography 251 i continuatori del Liber de claris mulieribus.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 40 (1902): 35–65. Toso Fei, Alberto. Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories: A Guide to Places of Mystery in Venice. Treviso: Elzeviro, 2002. Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Turbeville, Simone. “Prefatory Dialogue and Certain Sonnets from Girolamo Malipiero’s Il Petrarcha spirituale.” Allegorica 1.1 (1976): 126–65. Turchi, Marcello. “Composizione e situazione del romanzo umanistico di Iacopo Caviceo.” Aurea Parma: Rivista di Storia, Letteratura e Arte 46 (1962): 9–19. Vallone, Aldo. L’interpretazione di Dante nel Cinquecento. Florence: Olschki, 1969. – Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo. Vol. 4, parts 1 and 2 of Storia letteraria d’Italia. Padua: La Nuova Libraria Editrice, 1981. Venice Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguinetti White. Trans. Linda L. Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Varese, Claudio. “Premesse allo studio della Cronaca del Morelli.” La rassegna della letteratura italiana 2 (1954): 53–9. – Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento. Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Verdon, Timothy, and John Henderson. Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. L’individu, la mort, l’amour. Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Veronese, Phileto. Istoria. Ed. Giuseppe Biadego. Livorno: Raffaello Giusti, 1899. Vespasiano da Bisticci. Le vite. Ed. Aulo Greco. 2 vols. Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970–6. Visioni dell’aldilà in oriente e occidente: arte e pensiero: Atti del convegno di studi Firenze, Biblioteca degli Uffizi, 21 marzo 2003. Ed. Tōkyō Daigaku et al. Tokyo: Sangensha, 2003. Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio scritte fino al secolo decimosesto. Ed. Angelo Solerti. Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1904. Viti, Paolo. Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: Studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private. Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Warner, James Christopher. The Augustinian Epic: Petrarch to Milton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Weinstein, Donald. Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

252

Bibliography

Weiss, Roberto. “Notes on Petrarch and Homer.” Rinascimento 4 (1953): 263–75. Weissman, Judith. Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Welburn, Andrew J. The Truth of Imagination: An Introduction to Visionary Poetry. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989. Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Kathryn A. Edwards. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002. Whitfield, J.H. “Alberti in the Intercenali I: Defunctus.” Italian Studies 46 (1991): 58–68. Wilkins, Ernest H. Petrarch’s Later Years. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1959. Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance by Johann Weyer (De praestigiis daemonum, 1583). Ed. George Mora et al. Trans. John Shea. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Witt, Ronald. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Wright, Allison. “The Memory of Faces: Representational Choices in FifteenthCentury Florentine Portraiture.” In Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 86–113. Yousefzadeh, Mahnaz. City and Nation in the Italian Unification: The National Festivals of Dante Alighieri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Zaccaria, Vittorio. “La fortuna del De mulieribus claris del Boccaccio nel sec. XV: Giovanni Sabbadino degli Arienti, Jacopo Filippo Foresti e le loro bibliografie femminili.” In Il Boccaccio nelle culture e letterature nazionali, ed. Francesco Mazzoni. Florence: Olschki, 1978. 519–45. – “I volgarizzamenti del Boccaccio latino a Venezia.” In Boccaccio, Venezia e il Veneto, ed. Vittore Branca and Giorgio Padoan. Florence: Olschki, 1979. 131–52. Zaleski, Carol. Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Zampieri, Walter. “Brunelleschi e il Grasso.” Annali d’Italianistica 16 (1998): 49–63. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Index

Acciaiuoli, Andrea, 38, 41–2, 182n4 Acciaiuoli, Niccolò, 182n4 Adamson, Sylvia, 181n60 Adrian VI, 205n72 Aeneas, 8, 125, 128 Agamben, Giorgio, 27, 178–9nn54–5 Agnese di Montepulciano, 12 Ahern, John, 191n3 Alamanni, Lodovico, 167n10 Alberic III, Count of Tusculum, 217n7 Alberti, Leon Battista, 32 Alexander, Gavin, 181n60 Alexander VI, 88, 124 Alfie, Fabian, 166n6 Alighieri, Dante, 3, 5–8, 12–19, 23–4, 29, 31–4, 58, 60–2, 64, 66, 69–118, 123, 125, 130–1, 135, 139–41, 146, 158, 160, 169n16, 170n21, 172n22, 173n25, 175n35, 179–80n56, 180n59, 184nn17–18, 188n34, 189n35, 189–90nn37–8, 190n41, 190–2nn1–4, 192–3nn7–8, 193nn10–11, 193–4n14, 194n17, 195–6n26, 196n30, 197–8n32, 198–9nn36–7, 199–200nn43–6, 201–2nn48–53, 203n57, 204n61, 204n67, 204–6nn71–4, 206n5,

207–8n10, 211n36; Convivio, 191n1, 199n43, 200n44; De monarchia, 60, 99, 116, 118, 188n34, 199n37, 208n12; De vulgari eloquentia, 7, 111, 160, 206n5; Divina commedia, 3, 6, 8, 11, 13–18, 22, 32–3, 61, 64, 70, 73–6, 80, 83–7, 89–99, 101, 103, 112, 115, 125–6, 135, 146, 158, 160, 165n1, 169n16, 172n22, 172n24, 173n25, 174n31, 175n35, 180n56, 180n59, 184nn17–18, 189n35, 189n37, 191n1, 191–2n3, 193n11, 195nn23–4, 195–6n26, 198–9nn36–7, 199–200nn43–4, 201–2nn48–50, 202nn52–4, 203nn59–60, 205n72, 206n74, 209n22, 210n29; Epistle to Cangrande, 191n1; Vita Nuova, 22, 191n1, 199n43 Alighieri, Jacopo [Iacopo], 33, 70–5, 191–2n3, 193n11; Divisione/Chiose, 73, 192n3 Alighieri, Piero, 71, 73 Allan, Mowbray, 172n23 Altamura, Antonio, 182n8 Alvisi, Baldassare, 205n72 Anderson, R. Dean, 165n3 anthropopatheia, 165n3

254

Index

Antonio da Rieti, 34, 145–6, 218n10 apophrades, 163, 224n38 Aquinas, Thomas, 13, 34, 145–6, 171n21, 179n55 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, 188n35, 189n38 Aretino, Pietro, 53, 186n20 Ariani, Marco, 129, 211n34 Ariosto, Ludovico, 106, 128, 167n10, 169n17, 184n13, 204n67, 210n26; Orlando furioso, 119, 167n10, 169n17, 184n13, 210n26 Aristotle, 13, 28, 172n24 Armour, Peter, 173n25 Artemidorus, 127 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 172n22, 172n24, 178n52 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 211n33 Auerbach, Erich, 13–15, 18, 174nn29–30, 190n41 Augustine of Hippo, 18, 22–3, 30, 57–8, 177n44, 188n31 Averroism, 190n38 Bagemihl, Rolf, 193nn12–13 Bagli, Vincenzo, 31, 33, 37–44, 58, 67, 69, 181n2, 182n7, 182n10 Baglioni, Gianpaolo, 42 Baglioni, Lucrezia, 37, 39–43, 182n10 Baglioni, Rodolfo, 41–3 Baldassarri, Stefano U., 193nn12–13, 198n34, 218n11 Barański, Zygmunt G., 189–90n38 Barbarigo, Antonio, 122 Barbarigo, Marco, 122 Barbaro, Francesco, 22 Barbato da Sulmona, 176n42 Barbi, Michele, 195n23 Barolini, Teodolinda, 57, 172n23, 173n24, 174n26, 186n22, 188n31, 191n3

Baron, Hans, 176n41 Barnes, Hazel E., 224n35 Barthes, Roland, 13 Battle of Campaldino, 175n35 Bellincioni, Bernardo, 195n26 Bellomo, Saverio, 192n8 Bembo, Bernardo, 84–5, 98, 100, 128–9, 196n26, 196–7nn30–1 Bembo, Pietro, 52, 91, 98–100, 117, 126, 129, 183n12, 184n15, 186n21; Gli Asolani, 129; Rime, 184n15 Benaducci, Giovanni, 195n22 Benedetti, Anna, 171n21 Benedict IX (Theophylactus), 143, 217–18nn6–7 Benintendi, Antonio d’Orsino, 33, 70, 100 Benivieni, Girolamo, 33–4, 55–6, 66, 70, 87–99, 101, 107, 109, 130–6, 140–1, 158, 187n28, 198–9nn36–9, 199–200nn43–6, 201n48, 202nn50–1, 202n53, 203n57, 203n59, 203n61, 204n63, 211n37, 213n44, 213n46, 214n48, 215nn51–2; “Cantico in laude di Dante,” 87, 89–99, 109, 130–1, 140, 198–9n37, 200n45, 200–1nn47–8, 202n51, 202n53, 203n57; Canzone e Sonetti, 55; Commento a più sue canzone et sonetti, 55, 89–90, 187n28, 199–200n43, 203n61, 211–12n37, 213n44; Dialogo circa al sito, forma et misure dello Inferno, 200n43, 203n59; “In Persona dello Ill. S. Conte Giovanni Pico della Mirandula,” 134 Benivieni the Younger, Antonio, 132, 213n46, 214n48 Benson, Pamela Joseph, 182n8 Bergin, Thomas G., 176nn37–8, 194n15

Index 255 Bernardo, Aldo S., 176n36, 177n46, 190n38, 221n25, 223n31 Bernardo, Reta A., 177n46, 221n25 Beroaldo the Elder, Filippo, 125–6, 210n26 Bertoni, Giulio, 128–9, 211nn31–2 Betussi, Giuseppe, 44 Bigi, Emilio, 198n32, 200n45, 201n49 Billanovich, Giuseppe, 72, 192n7 Biow, Douglas, 170n18 Blasucci, Luigi, 167n9, 206n3 Bliss, Matthew T., 165n3 Bloom, Harold, 163, 190n41, 224n38 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 6, 9, 13, 23–34, 37–44, 58, 62, 65, 69–80, 87, 98, 108–11, 118, 119–21, 126, 141–3, 154, 161, 166n5, 176n42, 177–8nn49–50, 178n53, 179nn55–6, 180nn57–9, 182n4, 182–3nn9–10, 184n13, 188n35, 189–90nn38, 191nn1–3, 193n10, 193–4nn14–15, 197n32, 209n14, 210nn24–5, 217nn3–4, 220n22, 221n23, 222n28; Il Corbaccio, 221n23; Decameron, 65–6, 111, 142, 184n13, 188n35, 190n40, 217n4; De casibus virorum illustrium, 9, 24–32, 38, 177n49, 179n56, 180n59; De mulieribus claris, 33, 37–41, 58, 181n2, 182n9, 183n10; Eclogues/Olympia, 34, 154, 220n22; Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 210n25; Filocolo, 210n25; Trattatello in Laude di Dante, 6, 70, 72–4, 110, 166n5, 191–2nn1–4, 192–3nn7–8, 193n10, 194n14, 197n32; Zibaldone Laurenziano/ “Letter to Ilaro,” 73, 192n7, 193n8 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 169n17; Orlando innamorato, 169n17 Boli, Todd, 190n1, 192n8 Bollettino, Vincenzo Zin, 72, 192n6

Bongiovanni, Pellegra, 183n12 Boniface VIII, 16 Borgia, Cesare, 110, 124 Borgia, Lucretia, 120, 124, 129 Boscoli, Pietro Paolo, 110 Botticelli, Sandro, 83, 87, 195n24, 196n26 Boyde, Patrick, 173n24 Bracciolini, Gian Francesco Poggio, 22, 117 Branca, Vittore, 66, 166n5, 177n49, 178n51, 180n57, 190n40, 192n4, 194n15, 217n4, 219n14 Brand, Peter, 206n5 Brewer Hall, Louis, 178n51 Broccardi, Girolamo, 81–2 Brown, Alison, 203n60 Brown, Peter, 12, 170n20 Brown, Virginia, 38, 41, 181n2, 181n4, 182n9 Brownlee, Kevin, 190n41 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 188n35 Bruni d’Arezzo, Leonardo, 22, 32, 62, 74, 79–81, 99, 193n10, 194n17; Historiarum Florentiarum, 79; Vita di Dante, 74, 79 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 101, 106, 187n26 Butterfield, Andrew, 79, 194n16 Byron, Lord [George Gordon], 108, 204–5n71; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 108; The Prophecy of Dante, 204n71 Caccia, Gian Agostino, 184n13 Cacciaguida, 94, 96, 98, 171n21, 180n59, 202n52 Caciola, Nancy, 170n18 Calmet, Dom Antoine Augustine, 143–4, 218n9; Treatise on Vampires and Revenants, 143

256

Index

Cambon, Nella Doria, 204n71 Camporeale, Salvatore I., 219n13 Capponi, Agostino, 110 captatio benevolentia, 42–3, 63 Cardini, Roberto, 83–4, 195n23, 195n25, 197n31, 198n33, 203n60, 210n25 Caroli, Giovanni, 219n13; Liber dierum lucensium, 219n13 Carrara, Enrico, 129, 211n33 Carroll, John S., 14, 174n27 Casanova, E., 199n41 Casella, Mario, 167n8 Cassell, Anthony, K., 221n23 Cassian, John, 178n55 Castiglione, Baldassar, 141; Libro del Cortegiano, 141 Caterina da Siena, 12, 170n19 Caterina di Genova, 12 Cato of Utica, 14, 171n21, 174nn27–8, 180n56 Cavalcanti, Cavalcante de’, 93–4, 170n21 Cavalcanti, Giovanni di Niccolò, 59, 62–4, 66, 188n35 Cavalcanti, Guido, 33, 38, 58–66, 91, 93, 140, 188–9n35, 189–90n38, 200n47; Donna me prega, 189n35 Cavalcanti, Mainardo, 25, 32 Caviceo, Jacopo, 31, 33, 109, 118–22, 124–30, 208–9nn13–19, 210n23, 210n26, 210–11n29, 211n33; Confessionale, 208–9n13, 209n19; Libellus contra Hebreos, 209n19; La lupa, 209n19; Il Peregrino, 109, 118–30, 208n13, 209nn19–21, 210n23, 210n28, 211n33 Cellini, Benvenuto, 119 Cestaro, Gary P., 174n26 Chamberlin, E.R., 217n6 Charles VIII, 88, 132

Christmas, Henry, 218n9 Chorier, Nicolas, 210n23; Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, 210n23 Ciappelli, Giovanni, 194n16 Ciardi, John, 14, 174n27 Ciccarese, Maria Pia, 11 Cicero, 4, 10, 19, 54, 127, 158, 167–8n12, 178n52, 200n45, 207n8, 223n31; Pro Caelio, 167n12; Republic/“Dream of Scipio,” 19, 127, 175n35, 200n45, 207n8 Clement II, 218n7 Clement VII, 205n72, 214n48 Cochrane, Lydia G., 218n10 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 204n71 Collenuccio, Pandolfo, 87 Colonna, Francesco, 129, 211nn33–4; Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 129, 209n14, 211nn33–4 Colonna, Giovanni, 166n7 Colonna, Stefano, 183nn11–12 Conrad II, 218n7 Contini, Gianfranco, 173n24 conversion, 57–8, 88, 91, 95, 131, 144, 167n7, 188n31 Costantini, Toldo, 130; Il Giudicio estremo, 130, 211n35 Cottignoli, Alfredo, 193n8 Council of Costanza, 115 Council of Pisa, 115, 117, 207–8n10 Council of Sutri, 218n7 Crescimbeni, Giovanmario, 53 Cristoforo di Casalmaggiore, 215n49 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 13 d’Aragona, Alfonso, 124 d’Arezzo, Domenico, 62–3 d’Este, Alfonso, 124 da Brossano, Francescuolo, 77, 159 da Carrara the Younger, Jacopo, 158

Index 257 da Muglio, Pietro, 223n31 da Peraga, Bonaventura, 212n42 da Polenta, Guido, 73–4, 191–2n3 da Polenta, Nastagio, 80 Da Sant’Elpidio, Antonio, 41 da Serico, Lombardo, 177n46 dal Corno, Ugo, 62 Daniels, Rhiannon, 41, 43–4, 182n5, 182n8 Davis, Charles, 53, 187n26 de la Riva, Bonvesin, 12 de Man, Paul, 190n41 De Robertis, Domenico, 188n35 de’ Cerchi, Vieri, 175n35 de’ Filipepi, Simone, 89 de’ Nerli, Filippo, 206n2; Commentarj dei fatti civili, 206n2 de’ Pazzi, Maria Maddalena, 12 de’ Ricci, Caterina, 12 degli Agostini, Giovanni, 53, 187n24 degli Albizzi, Rinaldo, 81–2 del Balzo, Carlo, 196n26, 198n37, 204n62, 205–6nn72–4, 207nn7–8 del Garbo, Dino, 62, 188n35 del Lungo, Isidoro, 216n53 del Nero, Bernardo, 60, 188n34 Delcorno, Carlo, 218n8 della Casa, Tedaldo, 177n42 della Lana, Jacopo, 197n32 della Rovere, Giuliano. See Julius II della Scala, Cangrande, 70–5, 192n7 della Seta, Lombardo, 159 Della Torre, Giacomo Antonio, 121 Di Benedetto, Sergio, 203n61 Dini, Andrea, 166n6 Dionigi da Fano, Francesco, 184n13 Dionisotti, Carlo, 197n32, 199n42 Domenichi, Ludovico, 143, 217n5; Historia di detti, e fatti degni di memoria, 143, 217n5

Dominici, Giovanni, 219n13 Donation of Constantine, 174n32 donec corrigatur (method of the Inquisitional censor), 50 doppelgänger, 25, 27–31, 171n21, 179n56 Dorez, Leon, 215n49 Doty, Mark, 173n26 Dreyer, Peter, 195n24 Dufallo, Basil, 10–11, 166n4, 167n12, 168n14 Durling, Robert M., 45, 165n1, 171n21, 184n14, 184n17, 190n38, 200n44, 209n22 eidolopoeia, definition of, 4–7, 165n3, 166n4 Eliot, T.S., 12, 190n41 embriology, 12 Enenkel, Karl, 222n30 Ennius, 9–10, 19–22, 160; Annales, 20 entelechy, 15 Epicureanism, 190n38 Epimenides, 65, 190n39; Cretica, 190n39 Erasmo, Mario, 167n11 eschatology, 12, 15 ethopoeia, 5, 165n3, 166n4 Ettenhuber, Katrin, 181n60 Fagan, Teresa Lavender, 168n16, 220n21 Favati, Guido, 190n38 Fedalto, Giorgio, 11 Fedi, Roberto, 183nn11–12, 184n15, 186n21 Felton, D., 168n13 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 100 Ferguson, Francis, 172–3n24

258

Index

Ferreri, Zacharia, 33, 109, 114–18, 206n1, 207nn7–8, 207–8n10; “De Gallico in Venetos triumpho,” 115; Somnium Lugdunense de divi Leonis X, 109, 114–17, 206n1, 207n8 Ficino, Marsilio, 33, 60, 64, 66, 70, 83, 86–7, 118, 125–6, 128, 144, 188n34, 189n35, 198n32, 198n34, 199n38, 201n49, 202n51, 208n12; De raptu Pauli, 202n51; Dell’Amore, 188n34 Field, Arthur, 195n23, 203n60 figura impleta, 14 Filelfo, Francesco, 79, 81–3, 194n17, 195n20, 195n22; Satyrae, 81 Finucane, Ronald C., 11, 168n15, 207n6 Fior di virtù, 51 Flaubert, Gustave, 12 Foscolo, Ugo, 106 Francesca da Rimini, 123, 170n21, 200n43, 202n51 Francesco di Roma, 12 Franco, Niccolò, 53–4, 187n25; Pistole vulgari, 187n25 Franke, William, 166n7 Fraunce, Abraham, 181n60 Frazier, Alison Knowles, 170n20 Freccero, John, 173n24 Fubini, Riccardo, 194n18 Gabriele, Mino, 129, 211n34 Galilei, Galileo, 106 Garber, Marjorie B., 170n18 Garibaldi, Anita, 104 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 104 Garin, Eugenio, 195n23 Geary, Patrick J., 11 Gerhard, Mira, 172n23 Gesualdo, Giovan Andrea, 155, 221n25

Giacomino da Verona, 12 Giannetto, Nella, 128, 197n31, 211n30 Giardino [Giardini], Piero, 72, 75, 191n3 Gilbert, Allan H., 167n8 Gilson, Simon A., 80, 83, 193n8, 194n17, 195n19, 195n22 Giraldi Cintio, Giovanni Battista, 36, 53 Giovanni del Virgilio, 191n3 Giuliani, Giambattista, 103–4, 204nn68–9 Godorecci, Barbara J., 206n4 Goffen, Rona, 219n13 Gragnolati, Manuele, 11 Gratian, John, 218n7 Greenblatt, Stephen, 13, 180n60 Greene, Thomas M., 166n7 Greer, Germaine, 176n42 Gregory VI, 218n7 Griffin, Clive, 210n23 Grillo, Angelo, 102 Gruppioni, Giorgio, 204n71 Guido da Montefeltro, 16 Guinizzelli, Guido, 91, 171n21, 200n47 habeas corpus, 34, 161–2, 224n36 Hammond Broadus, Eleanor, 171n21 Hartman, Geoffrey, 190n41 Hawkins, Peter S., 173n26 Haym, Niccola Francesco, 182n7 Henderson, John, 170n20 hermeneutics, 166–7n7 hermeticism, 96 Hermogenes, 5 Hieatt, Constance B., 12 Homer, 9–10, 19–22, 28, 78, 90, 125, 158, 170n21, 176n39, 223n31 Horace, 90, 178n52

Index 259 Hoskyns, John, 181n60 Houston, Jason M., 179n56, 180nn58–9, 193n8, 193n14 Hutton, Edward, 194n15 Huygens, Constantijn, 12 idol making, 5, 13, 162 idolo (as hapax legomenon in Dante’s Commedia), 16–17, 174n31 imitatio maiorum, 11 Indizio, Giuseppe, 193n8 Inglese, Giorgio, 206n4 insolubilia, 190n39 Jacobelli, Jader, 215n49, 216n53 Jacoff, Rachel, 173n26, 198n35, 203n60 Jannaco, Carmine, 220n19 Jansen, Annemiek, 165n3 Jerome, 30 Joanna Queen of Naples, 40–2, 182n4 John, Bishop of Sabina, 218n7 John XIX, 217n7 Johnston, Sarah Iles, 168n13 Joynes, Andrew, 11 Julius II, 110, 115 Kallendorf, Craig, 176n40 Kay, Richard, 173n25 Keats, John, 12 Kennedy, William J., 183n11 King, Ed, 172n23 Kirkham, Victoria, 177n45, 181n1, 222n26 Kolsky, Stephen, 41, 182n8, 182n10 Kraye, Jill, 171n22 Landino, Cristoforo, 83–7, 91, 97–8, 106, 125, 128, 189n36, 193n11,

195n23, 195–6nn26–7, 196n29, 197n31, 198nn32–4, 202–3nn55–7, 203nn59–60, 210n25 Landon, William J., 206n4 Lansing, Richard, 173n25, 191n1 Latini, Brunetto, 3, 14–15, 170n21, 173–4nn25–6; Trésor, 173n25 Lausberg, Heinrich, 165n3 League of Cambrai, 99, 115 Leatherdale, Clive, 218n9 Ledos, E.G., 197n31 Lentzen, Manfred, 196n27, 202n55 Leo X, 100–11, 110, 114–17, 205n72, 210n26 Leporatti, Roberto, 187n27 Lepschy, Anna Laura, 210n23 Levin, Saul, 177n46, 221n25 Livy, 158 Looney, Dennis, 204n67 Lucan, 10, 90 Luzzi, Joseph, 204n67 Lynch, Kathryn L., 12 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6–8, 12, 33, 106–7, 109–14, 117–18, 139, 160, 167n10, 206n1, 206nn3–5; Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, 7–8, 109–13, 160, 206n4 Macrobius, 19, 127, 210n28 Maggi, Armando, 156, 170n18, 177n45, 181n1, 222n26 Magna Carta, 162 Malipiero, Girolamo, 31, 33, 35, 37, 44–58, 67, 69, 139–40, 160–1, 183nn11–12, 184n13, 184n15, 185–6nn18–21, 187n23, 187nn 29–30; Il Petrarcha spirituale, 35, 37, 44, 47, 55–6, 139, 183nn11–12, 184n16 Malispini, Riccardano, 62

260

Index

Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio, 6, 33, 38, 58–68, 84, 140, 188–9nn31–7, 200n43, 201n49; Dialogo circa al sito, forma et misure dello Inferno, 58–9, 199n37, 200n43; La novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo, 59; Notizia di Guido Cavalcanti, 58–66, 140, 188n34; Uomini singolari in Firenze, 58 Manetti, Giannozzo, 32, 58, 62, 74–5, 193n12; Vita Dantis, 74 Manheim, Ralph, 174n29 Marini, Vincenzo, 184n13 Maripietro, Girolamo. See Malipiero, Girolamo Marsh, David, 177n45, 223n32 Marsuppini, Carlo, 81–2 Martelli, Mario, 208n12 Martellotti, G., 177n43, 223n33 Martinetti Cardoni, Gasparo, 211n36 Martinez, Ronald L., 165n1, 171n21, 178n54, 209n22 Marzi, Agnolo, 133–4 Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, 184n13 Mazzoni, Francesco, 204n67 Mazzoni, Guido, 167n8 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 173n24, 222n30 McClure, George W., 220n17, 222n28 McLaughlin, M.L., 171n22 Medici, Alessandro de’, 133–4, 215n49 Medici, Cosimo de’, 81–2, 85 Medici, Giovanni de’. See Leo X Medici, Giuliano de’, 85 Medici, Giulio de’. See Clement VII Medici, Lorenzo de’, 66, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 97, 128, 131, 134–5, 189n35, 196n27, 201n49, 215n52 Medici, Margherita de’, 131

Medici, Piero de’, 88, 132, 215n49 Medici Salviati, Lucrezia de’, 204n63 Meditazioni sulla vita di Cristo, 51 Meltzoff, Stanley, 199n38 Mercati, Michael, 144 Michelet, Jules, 12 Micoletti, Marcantonio, 212n42 Miglio, Massimo, 180n57 Milanesi, Gaetano, 188nn33–4, 196n28 Miller, James, 172n23 mimesis, 13, 165n3 Mommsen, Theodor E., 221n24 Morando of Forlì, Neri, 221n25 Morelli, Giovanni, 34, 146–54, 219n14, 220n19; Ricordi, 34, 144–52, 154, 219n14, 220n19 Morsolin, M.E. Bernardo, 207nn7–8, 207–8nn10–11 Murphy, Stephen, 194n16, 215n52 Najemy, John M., 167n8 Nardi, Carlo, 205n72 narratology, 9, 172n24 necromancy, 166–7n7 Nelli, Francesco, 176n42 Neri, Antonio, 200n46 New Historicism, 13 Niccoli, Ottavia, 218n10 Nichols, J.G., 176nn42–3 Nidobeato, Martino Paolo, 97, 197n32 Orsini, Rinaldo, 122 Orton, David E., 165n3 Ovid, 90, 222n29; Tristia, 222n29 Pacca, Vinicio, 217n1 Padoan, Giorgio, 73–4

Index 261 Palmieri, Matteo, 84, 175n35, 201n49; Città di vita, 201n49; Vita civile, 175n35 Paolino, Laura, 217n1 Papini, Giovanni, 171n21 Parenti, Alcide, 167n10 Parini, Giuseppe, 106 Parker, Deborah, 195n23 Parodi, Ernesto G., 189n36 Pasolini, Pier Desiderio, 72, 101, 192n5, 204n64 Pasquini, Emilio, 193n8 Passarini, Ludovico, 199n40 pathopoeia, 165n3 Paul II, 41, 121 Pazzi conspiracy, 85 Pellegrini, Anthony L., 190n38 Pelligrini, Bianca, 209n20 performance theory, 11 Perini, Dino, 191n3 Pertile, Lino, 206n5 Petrarca, Francesco, 4, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 18–25, 27–32, 34–7, 44–58, 62, 67, 69–70, 77–8, 87, 106, 108, 111, 138–40, 155–61, 166n6, 176n36, 177nn42–3, 177n46, 178n52, 180nn57–8, 183–4nn12–15, 184–5nn17–18, 185–7nn20–2, 187n25, 187–8nn29–31, 212–13n42, 217n1, 221–3nn24–32; Africa, 9, 18–24, 157, 160, 176n38; De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, 223n32; De viris illustribus, 25; Epistola posteritati, 24, 34, 48, 155, 157–60, 222n30; Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XXIV/Familiares, 22, 156, 158, 223n31; Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Canzoniere), 37, 44–7, 51–3, 58, 67, 140, 183–4nn11–14,

185–6nn20–2; Res seniles. Libri I–IV/Seniles, 23–4, 157–8, 161, 177nn46–8, 221n25, 222n28, 223n33; Secretum, 18, 22–3, 176–7nn42–3, 188n31; Testamentum, 24, 155–6, 159, 222nn26–7; Triumphi, 138–9, 217n1 Pettas, William Anthony, 203n58 Pézard, André, 173n25 Phillimore, Catherine Mary, 102, 197n30, 204n65, 205n72 Plett, Heinrich F., 165n3 Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco, 214n48, 215n49 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 4, 34, 109, 125–6, 131–7, 158, 203n61, 211–12nn37–8, 212n42, 213nn44–6, 214n48, 215nn49–51, 216n53 Pierozzi, Antonino, 219n13 Pieters, Jürgen, 12–13 Plaisance, Michel, 184n13 Plato, 19, 175n34, 188n34, 189n35; Convivium, 189n35; Libro dell’amor, 188n34; Republic/“Myth of Er,” 19, 175n34 Plutarch, 10 Poggioli, Renato, 175n33 Poliziano, Angelo Ambrogini, 87, 132, 135–6, 189n35, 209n14, 215n49, 215–16nn52–3; Nutricia, 215–16n52; Stanze, 209n14; Sylvae, 216n52 Polizzotto, Lorenzo, 204n61 Polo, Marco, 106 Priscian, 5, 165n3, 174n26; Praeexercitamina, 5 prosopopoeia, 4, 10, 165n3, 166n4, 167n11, 168n12, 170n18, 181n60 Psaki, F. Regina, 181n3, 221n23 Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, 199n39, 204n63

262

Index

Quintilian, 4–5, 165nn2–3; Institutio oratoria, 4–5, 165n1 Quondam, Amedeo, 50–1, 183nn11–12, 185nn19–20 Raccolta aragonese, 61, 189n35 Raphael, 106 Rasponi, Giovanni, 211n36 Re, Caterina, 132, 199n38, 212–3nn38–43, 213–15nn45–50 Rhodes, Dennis E., 210n23 Ricci, Corrado, 102, 197n30, 204n66, 211nn35–6 Ricci, Lucia Battaglia, 173n24 Ricci, Pier Giorgio, 191n2 Riccio, Giovanni Giacomo, 206n74; I diporti di Parnaso, 206n74 Richardson, Brian, 206n5 Riminesi, Giuseppe, 104–6, 204n70 Romano, Egidio, 62 Rossi, Pier Maria, 209nn19–20 Rossi, Sergio, 206n2 Rossi, Vittorio, 223n31 Rovorella, Filasio, 120–1, 125 Rubin, Patricia Lee, 194n16 Russell, Donald A., 165nn2–3 Russell, J. Stephen, 12 Ruvoldt, Maria, 12 Saiber, Arielle, 198n34, 218n11 Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, 169n16 Sallust, 39 Salvatorino, Gian Giacomo, 184n13 Sancti Nili, 178n55 Sanudo, Marin, 215n49; Diarii, 215n49 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 161, 224n35 Sassetti, Niccolò, 41 Savonarola, Girolamo, 55, 64, 87–9, 93–4, 97–9, 110, 131–2, 134, 136,

140, 203n61, 214n48, 215n49, 218n12 Scarpati, Claudio, 182n8 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 11, 153, 168–9n16, 219n14, 220n21 Schulze Altcappenberg, HeinThomas, 195n24 Scipio Africanus, 18–22, 69, 108, 127, 160–1, 176n36 Scott, John A., 174n28 Selva, Crisippo, 184n13 Seneca, 158 Serdonati, Francesco, 44 Setton, Kenneth M., 205n72 Sforza, Giovanni, 124 Shumaker, Wayne, 170n18 Sidney, Sir Philip, 12 Simona, Lorenza, 121, 209nn15–19 Singleton, Charles S., 172n24, 200n44 slander, 16 Smith, James Robinson, 166n5, 192n4, 193n10 Socrates, 10, 175n34 Soderini, Piero, 110 Solerti, Angelo, 193nn10–11, 212n42, 221n25 Solon, 76 “Sonetto all’imagine di Dante,” 130 Specht, Henrik, 165n3 Spini, Doffo, 89 Spitzer, Leo, 172n24 Statius, 14, 18, 91, 171n21 Steinberg, Justin, 173n25 Steiner, George, 13 Stephens, Walter, 170n18, 190n41 Stewart, Alan, 173n25 Stillinger, Thomas, 181n3, 221n23 Stinger, Charles L., 116, 207n9 Storey, H. Wayne, 166n6, 174n26, 191n3

Index 263 Stöve, Eckehart, 207n7 Strozzi, Ercole, 124–6 Strozzi, Palla di Onofrio, 82 Suetonius, 10 Sullivan, Jack, 217n2 Sylvester III, 218n7 Tanturli, Giuliano, 188n32, 188n34, 189n36 Tartaro, Achille, 129, 211n33 Tasso, Torquato, 106, 175n35, 184n13; Rime amorose, 184n13 Tenenti, Alberto, 194n16 Tetel, Marcel, 219n13 Theophylactus. See Benedict IX Thompson, David, 222n29, 223n34 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 207n7 Tolomei of Siena, Claudio, 207n5; Il Cesano, 207n5 Tomai, Tommaso, 211n36 Took, John, 210n23 Torelli, Barbara, 124 Torretta, Laura, 182n8 Tournoy, Gilbert, 180n57 Trexler, Richard C., 147, 150, 153, 219n14, 220nn15–16, 220n18, 220n20 Trissino, Giangiorgio, 206n5 Trivulzio, Gian Giacomo, 115 Turbeville, Simone, 183n11 Turchi, Marcello, 209n14

Vallone, Aldo, 195n23, 204n67 Varese, Claudio, 219n14 Vasoli, Cesare, 133 Vellutello, Alessandro, 186n21, 193n10 Verdi, Giuseppe, 106 Verdon, Timothy, 170n20 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 22 Veronese, Guarino, 22 Vico, Giambattista, 190n41 Vignali, Luigi, 122, 208n13, 209n20 Villani, Filippo, 62, 193n11 Villani, Giovanni, 62 Villari, P., 199n41 Virgil, 10, 14, 18, 78, 90–2, 98–9, 125, 169n16, 171–2n22, 178n50, 184nn17–18, 202n50, 216n52; Aeneid, 169n16, 171n22, 172n24, 178n50, 202n50; Eclogues, 216n52 Visconti, Ennio Quirino, 106 Vitello, Camillo, 41–2 Viti, Paolo, 81, 193n10, 194n19, 195n21

Uguccione da Lodi, 12 Ulysses, 125, 171n21, 200n43 Urban V, 155

Waldman, Guido, 190n40, 217n4 Walter, Duke of Athens, 31–2, 193n14 Warner, James Christopher, 175n35 Weinstein, Donald, 204n61 Weiss, Roberto, 223n31 Wilkins, Ernest H., 176n41, 217n1 Wilson, Alice S., 176nn37–8 Witt, Ronald, 219n13 Wright, Allison, 194n16

Vacchetta, Guido, 191n3 Valla, Lorenzo, 32

Zaccaria, Vittorio, 177n49, 182n8 Zingarelli, Nicola, 199n37