Sermo absentium: Rhetoric, Epistolarity, and the Emergence of Italian Literary Culture - eScholarship

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The goal of this dissertation is to propose a theory for the emergence of Italian literary culture in the Duecento , with particular reference to the lyric production of Giacomo da Lentini and Guittone d'Arezzo, as well as to the Dantean literary history of Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI. `Le origini', the label long preferred by Italian literary criticism to describe the period between 1230 and 1300, presupposes a coherent national narrative framed, on one side, by an irrepressible vernacular spirit that defies political fragmentation and, on the other, by Italy's hard-won unification in the nineteenth century. Though Italian studies has done much to undermine this fiction for all periods of Italian literature, significant gaps in scholarship remain for the Duecento . This is due to complications arising, first of all, from the traditional division of disciplinary labor, but also from the condition of the literary record, which is limited chronologically to the years around 1300 and geographically to Tuscany and Bologna. A third challenge faced by scholars of the Italian thirteenth century is the overwhelming presence of Dante, whose self-consciously ambitious Commedia , along with the De vulgari eloquentia , provides the most complete, if problematically teleological, literary history available from the period. Recent advances in the history of rhetoric - in particular Ronald Witt's The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy - have opened critical space for a non-teleological Duecento that is, nevertheless, acutely aware of Dante's influence. It is within that space that I intend to formulate a theory for the emergence of Italian literary culture that accounts not only for the writing practices of thirteenth-century Italian lyric poets, but also for the Dantean literary history that structures their reception. This dissertation argues that the three traditional movements of early Italian poetry - the scuola siciliana , the siculo-toscani , and the Dolce stil nuovo - can mapped onto the bifurcation of medieval Latin into the `legal-rhetorical' documentary culture of the communes, which emerged as a result of the Investiture Struggle in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the revival of Carolingian `traditional book culture' that accompanied the `rise of the signori ' at the end of the thirteenth century. The lyric poetry of the communal period - that of Giacomo da Lentini and Guittone d'Arezzo - results from the importation of Occitan song into a discursive milieu defined by the ars dictaminis . The effect of the practical rhetorical arts on the Duecento lyric can be seen, on the one hand, in its epistolary orientation, which is most fully manifest in the sonnet, tenzone , and canzoniere ; and, on the other, in the pessimistic ambiguity of Guittone's trobar clus, which foregrounds the troubling polysemy of courtly signifiers. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, however, renewed interest in `traditional book culture' attends the collapse of the commune, and Dante's Commedia disparages the association of Italy's early lyric tradition with the `municipal' activities of notaries and dictatores . Instead, Dante's classicizing tendencies, nourished not only by Brunetto Latini's Ciceronian revival, but also by early Paduan humanism, lead him to reject lyric poetry outright, which brings to a close the first stage of development of Italy's vernacular literary culture.