Title: The sequence "beginning-middle-end," Dante and Petrarch
Description: This dissertation focuses on the pervasive presence of the triadic formula beginning-middle-end in medieval Italian literature. While recent scholars of medieval Italian poetry have identified this formula as a medieval topos occurring especially in the poetry of the Duecento, a comprehensive study has never been conducted. The relatively high frequency of the formula, appearing explicitly as a sequence of terms, occurs from the earliest of Italian texts until the end of the Renaissance, and I argue that this usage derives from its frequent occurrence in classical and medieval philosophical texts (from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas). I approach the sequence, not as a topos, but as a philosophical tool of understanding that was often used conceptually in conjunction with notions of wholeness, partiality, divisibility, indivisibility, succession and instantaneity. I call for a reassessment of the sequence by analyzing its genesis, frequency, variation, philosophical ramifications and meaning in early Italian literature. I argue for a conceptualized usage of the sequence which I apply to two cardinal texts of the Italian canon--Dante's Commedia and Petrarch's Canzoniere --where we can see how both poets continuously engage the sequence throughout their poems, but in two fundamentally different ways.

Chapter I examines the presence of the sequence in medieval Italian literature and the sequence's origins in the most important philosophers of the Western tradition. Chapter II investigates the concept of philosophical progression through the Scholastic notion of principles in order to show how Dante problematizes the rigid structuring of his poem so that the middle and end of each canticle contain a sense of a beginning. Chapter III focuses on the only two instances of non-succession in the Comedy, creation and the Empyrean, to demonstrate how Dante ultimately transcends the limits of the sequence through the pilgrim's movement from the physical world to a non-place outside time and space. In contrast, Chapter IV shows how Petrarch, whom I define as the poet of the middle par excellence, remains imprisoned within the limits of the sequence by highlighting the middle of a poem (or a series of poems) throughout his Canzoniere.