Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1995 Vol. 17 No. 1

Gathering Petrarch: Rare and Well Done in the Kroch Library

William J. Kennedy

Fall, 1966: The raging Arno River inundates Florence. As a graduate student in New Haven, I fantasize a dissertation topic about commentaries on epic and allegory in early printed editions of Virgil and Dante.

Fall, 1968: The Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence is my library of choice for overseas research. Overseas: le mot juste. As it happens, virtually all of its holdings have been interned for post-alluvial restoration. Brimming with frustration, I cut my losses and head for the drier clime of Rome.

Fall, 1970: Ithaca, on the whole less dry and (twenty-five years ago) without much access to opera, espresso, or quattrocento art. On the other hand, the Fiske Collection serves up all the books I'd hoped for: scores of early modern printed editions that bear a virtual palimpsest of contemporaneous literary history, theory, and criticism.

How did they make their way to upstate New York? Assembled by Fiske in Italy from 1881 to 1904, the Dante and Petrarch Collection appears to have been virtually set in its present form when Mary Fowler catalogued it in 1916 and 1920. Then as now it has opened up a gold mine for research of all sorts, not just in literary matters, but also in the history of ideas and representations, gender relations, social practices, class distinctions, literacy, and artistic preferences.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editors commonly printed the classics with an arsenal of paratextual apparatus, including prefaces, footnotes, commentaries, topical indexes, illustrations, and other interpretive aids that present each text from a new and different angle. The upshot is a repository of materials that enables us to imagine, understand, and wonder at the reception of such texts in earlier times. These materials show at a glance how others shaped a literary canon on horizons far different from our own, upsetting many of our preconceptions about who read what, and how and why they read it.

Over the past two decades I've been scouring marginalia on the Italian poetry of Francesco Petrarch (1304Ð74). His collection of 366 songs and sonnets composed in a highly artificial and already outworn mix of Tuscan, Sicilian, Latinate, and even Gallic-flavored vernaculars, soared into fashion throughout Europe in 1525 when a wealthy Venetian named Pietro Bembo judged it a model for Italian style. The story of how these two-hundred-year-old poems captured the Western imagination enfolds a much larger story about the production and distribution of early modern texts, the history of reading and literacy, the fashioning of a reading and writing public, and the responses of actual readers -- men and women -- to the mirroring of themselves in these texts as lovers, subjects, citizens, vassals to a sovereign, members of a church, inheritors of a discourse.

My recent book, Authorizing Petrarch , traces the process by which Petrarch's poetry became canonical, first in northern Italy of the fifteenth century, then in sixteenth-century Barcelona, Lyon, Paris, and London. In an age so skeptical as ours, the authority of no text appears self-evident, nor does its designation as a classic seem the guaranteed outcome of any natural consensus. Commentaries on PetrarchÕs poetry in early modern printed editions exemplify the kinds of cultural interaction and, at times, of social and political intervention that authorize such texts.

Consider the earliest gloss. It was composed by Antonio da Tempo in Padua before the 1440s, was reworked by Francesco Filelfo, who dedicated it to Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan in 1446, and was completed by Hieronimo Squarzafico in 1484. Taking its cue from the biographical fact that Petrarch's longest period of service in Italy was with the Visconti from 1353 to 1361, it unapologetically promotes the strongly monarchist ideals of Milan counter to the republican ones of Florence attributed to Petrarch in 1436 by Leonardo Bruni's Vita di Petrarca.

By 1525 the Venetian editor Alessandro Vellutello offers a different history, neither Florentine nor Milanese. In order to tell a better story that will coincide with the biography implied in PetrarchÕs letters and other evidence, he rearranges the poems in a new narrative order, to which he adds copious notes, illustrations, and even a unique topographic relief map based on his own travels through the poet's environs in Avignon and Vaucluse (see illustration above). In quick succession Sylvano da Venafro at Naples in 1533, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo likewise at Naples in 1533, and Bernardino Daniello of Lucca in 1541, all contest VellutelloÕs popularizing account. They in turn construct another Petrarch who in their view resembles a Castiglione-style courtier ever mindful of the manners of the elite that regulate social behavior.

A final group of commentators authorizes a more radical, less predictable view than the others, of a Petrarch imbued with Reformist ideals. Both Fausto da Longiano in 1532 and Ludovico Castelvetro in the 1540s rubbed elbows in Lutheran circles at Modena, while Antonio Brucioli cozied up to Calvin's sympathizers at Ferrara in 1548. Each represents Petrarch as proto-Protestant, disdainful of scholastic cliches, teeming with references to St. Augustine and the Scriptures, and adept in satirizing the Avignon papacy.

To authorize Petrarch in these different ways presents a series of Renaissance Petrarchs as different from one another as each is from the historical fourteenth-century author, and also as different as each is from our own twentieth-century understandings of him. In a way that Freudians would call uncanny, however, many of these earlier concerns also occupy the field of literary criticism as it enters the twenty-first century: the poet's role as a lover and his gendered expectations about men's and women's responses to love; his role as a member of overlapping communitiesÑsocial, cultural, political, intellectual, religious; his attention to conduct and action -- to what extent his ethics follows conventions defined by gender, class, and local identity; his politics -- whether republican or monarchist, regional or emergently nationalistic. Not only are these concerns profoundly relevant to early modern critical understandings of Petrarch, but they are profoundly relevant to our late modern aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and sociocultural understandings as well.

These are some of the possibilities embedded in this astonishing collection. There are some gaps that the library is still working to fill. But after such a flood of riches, who could be peevish about our local (and steadily improved) access to opera, espresso, and quattrocento art?