“The Italian Poetic Triumvirate Realized: Visualizing the ‘Trionfi’ of the ‘tre corone’,” is the first study to analyze the mostly unexplored fifteenth-century visualizations of Francesco Petrarca’s unfinished poem, I Trionfi (1351-1374), through an intermedial lens. While the intertextual references to two prior works, namely Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s l’Amorosa visione (c.1342), have been studied in some detail, my project is the first to locate the intermedial ties between Boccaccio and Petrarch. Additionally, I am the first to explore the imagery for the Trionfi and its tie to both literary and visual elements in the Commedia. I develop a new reading of these canonical works by tracing various macchine, or ‘machines,’ such as God’s chariot located in the Book of Ezekiel, medieval French literary automata, and civic-sacred public pageantry, that intertextually appear in Dante’s and Boccaccio’s poems. I further examine how contemporary visual examples, such as Buonamico Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death in the Pisa Camposanto (c.1336-1340) and Giotto di Bondone’s Triumph of Vainglory, originally depicted in Azzo Visconti’s palace in Milan (c.1336), similarly portray these macchine and serve as artistic interlocutors for Boccaccio’s “triumphs.” It is only through Petrarch’s mediation of these mechanisms from Dante, Boccaccio, and contemporary visual artists that his readers, and those who later attempt to depict his poem visually, acquire an image of the Trionfi.

It is apparent that this intermedial triumphal discourse does not cease with fifteenth-century Italian visualizations of Petrarch’s text. As a further point of comparison, I conclude by demonstrating how the “triumph of the tre corone” extends and is re-integrated into other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poems, artworks, and public festivals on a broader European scale. My methodology brings the textual and visual Trionfi in conversation with works that implicitly adhere to the same composite triumphal dialogue, allowing us to reconsider and enhance our reading of later texts. Though I offer the case study of the visual reworking of “Petrarch’s” Triumph of Chastity in Queen Elizabeth I’s Sieve Portrait (c.1583) by Quentin Metsys the Younger, my dissertation invites audiences to regard other examples, including Angelo Poliziano’s re-writing of the hybrid “Trionfi” in Part II of his Stanze per la giostra (1478), Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-1482) and triumphal entrees at least as far away in time and space as those of Henri II into Rouen (1550), along similar lines.

The broader implication of this project is that it explores what happens when there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between textual model and visual representation or between visual model and successor text. My project underscores the intermedial value of equal parts text and image from another source. Through distinct, yet complimentary approaches, each chapter questions the dominant discourses of transmission and reception as direct models for representation to uncover the multi-layered dimensions embedded within a singular textual or discursive example. This critical analysis complicates conventional methodologies for literary and visual analysis which may take for granted the inherent meaning of a particular text or material object. By proposing new angles through which to consider the relationship between literary and visual histories, this research accentuates their interconnectedness as part of a broader, sociopolitical and cultural history. Such mutual dialogues of exchange bolster opportunities for analytical evaluations of the role of intermediality across numerous disciplines, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.

Abstract

Authorizing the Reader: Dante and the Ends of the Decameron

by Natalie Ann Cleaver

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Albert Ascoli, Chair

We now speak easily of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as the tre corone of Italian literature, the three great foundational authors of the tradition, but there is no question who stands first among them. Not just for his historical primacy of place, or his commanding self–presentation, but also for his truly daunting range of influence, Dante Alighieri is the Italian poet with whom all others must reckon. He influenced the development of virtually every aspect of Italian culture, from literature and the Italian language itself, to theology, political philosophy, historical memory, and even constructions of national identity. Though this influence has been long–lasting, it was every bit as pervasive in his own age.

Few felt Dante’s shadow more than Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the first in subsequent generations of writers in the vernacular who had to negotiate his relationship to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio was a great Dantista in his own right; in addition to giving the first set of public lectures on the Commedia, he also composed the Trattatello in laude di Dante, in which he is the first to apply the epithet divina to the Commedia. Boccaccio obviously respected and admired Dante as a poet deeply. His minor works in particular demonstrate a profound engagement with the Commedia, and this relationship has been the subject of much recent scholarship.

The most puzzling case of Boccaccio’s debts to Dante is his own great vernacular masterpiece: the Decameron. On the one hand, the Decameron signals its relationship to the Commedia in some very obvious ways: the structure of the 100 stories, its title, and the appearance of many of the same characters who populate the Commedia. On the other, past these obvious signs, the relationship begins to break down, or to seem merely superficial upon further investigation. Any analysis of this relationship is additionally complicated by the seemingly antithetical nature and tone of the two works.

This dissertation examines one of the crucial ways in which the Decameron seems to be antithetical to the Commedia: Boccaccio's construction of authorship. I argue that Boccaccio creates an authorial persona who intentionally represents his Decameron as flawed, contradictory, and full of error. This persona in turn claims a distinctly un–authoritative authorship, disavowing his control over meaning and insisting that readers alone are responsible for how the Decameron is interpreted. This construction of authorship is not merely dissimilar to Dante’s; I suggest instead that it is a conscious response to Dante's own masterful self–presentation as author that reflects a deep engagement with the Commedia. Where Dante demonstrates anxiety over possible misinterpretation, working to control and constrain modes of reading, Boccaccio’s authorial persona emphasizes moments in which the Decameron is most open to multiple and conflicting interpretations.

The Decameron has long been understood to contain various structural and narrative ambivalences, apparent gaps in its creative and literary coherence. My dissertation reframes these seeming flaws as the “staging of failure” by Boccaccio, arguing that they are part of the same construction of the errant authorial persona. In the Decameron, Boccaccio creates structures of expectation, makes programmatic declarations of intent, only later to draw attention to the text's failure to live up to those promises. (Thus, the simultaneously obvious and seemingly insubstantial references to the Commedia — the first of the great “failures” of the Decameron, is its failure to be Dantean.) Boccaccio’s true authorial project in staging these failures is to train astute readers capable of understanding how texts produce meaning and generate authority.

“Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy” is the first study to address the dynamics of reciprocity and collaboration between Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) and women writers, performers, and patrons. This dissertation situates Tasso’s literary and cultural activities with women within social and historical contexts, especially those informed by the disputes regarding women’s status of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly known as the querelle des femmes. Among the lines of inquiry I pursue in this study is how the fiction of “Tasso, the errant madman” is a broadly popular literary-artistic construct, a product of the Romantic imagination that lionized the poet’s documented history of disquieting paranoia. While localized episodes from Tasso’s biography—including his seven years of detention in Ferrara for his public displays of defiance against the Este court—lend some credibility to this sorely isolating depiction of the poet, the story I tell attends to other considerations.

By studying Tasso through the lens of early modern sociability, this research raises awareness of the poet’s activities coordinating literary-intellectual networks. Emphasized herein is how Tasso’s socialized literary production—his nearly 4,000 letters and lyric poems sent to friends and potential patrons, dialogues with contemporary interlocutors, and epic poems about mobility and community building—reflects the cultural communities in which he participated. Essential collaborators in these settings are contemporary women writers, performers, and patrons, socially marginalized figures who shared in Tasso’s need to secure sponsorship from institutional authorities. In careful analysis of Tasso’s writings and women’s active reception of them, I demonstrate how the male poet’s sympathetic representation of fictional female characters yielded positive responses among historical female readers: professional singers and actresses designed performance programs based on the Gerusalemme liberata’s women, while female poets disseminated Tasso’s thematic and conceptual principles. The thesis this dissertation advances is that Tasso’s multifaceted connections with women shaped the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of cultural networks—literary, musical, theatrical, and scientific—in which opportunities for women and men to collaborate as intellectual protagonists increased due to developments in the notion of collective identity.

More broadly, this study underscores the collaborative networks within which early modern poets circulated, and situates questions of group identity at the forefront of the study of literary history. My findings reveal that the literary-intellectual exchanges between Tasso and women model multi-authored transmission, more than they indicate a linear process of reception. Tasso learned from women as much as women learned from Tasso. In different, though interconnected ways, each chapter challenges the dominant discourses of reception as a narrow form of imitation by shifting the critical focus from constructions of canonicity to modes of reciprocity. This attention complicates the conservative approaches to literary history that assert the dominant influence of one canonical (typically male) author. In this respect, the comparative work conducted herein avoids conveying any sense of hierarchy between Tasso’s constructed “canonical” voice and women’s marginalized “other” voices. This study further indicates how early modern women’s integration in poetic production—as makers and muses—complements the history of women’s one-sided efforts to “transcend their sex.” By offering new perspectives onto the relationship between literary and performance histories, this research brings into relief their interrelation as part of a broader, sociopolitical cultural history. Such emphases expand opportunities for critical investigation into ideas of collective authorship and audience, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.

The Baldus, a lengthy macaronic epic crafted over the course of a lifetime by one of Italy's greatest poets, is a masterpiece of Christian serio ludere which presents to readers a rousing and protracted rebuttal to the Platonic critique of poetry. This dissertation performs a three-chapter examination of the language, genre, and text of the four editions of the Baldus, those curated by Teofilo Folengo, with the aim of illuminating how the diachronic and synchronic features of his epic, as well as his use of a mixed-language style, Macaronic, in dozens of texts linked to this central project, are not simply `symptomatic' expressions of the convergence and conflation of humanist cultures, vernacular literary traditions, and ancient and medieval Latinities in a single text, but are rather highly generative, extraordinarily influential, and totally coherent parts of an anti-epic whose fictitious author, Merlin Cocaio, aims to outdo both Virgil and Homer---the greatest poets of the Western classical tradition---in macaronic verse. I demonstrate how three aspects of this poem---its language, genre, and textual presentation---interact with 'para'- and intertextual materials in the macaronic book and with an encyclopedic range of sources, to form a poem, collection, and even formalized prosodic system for Macaronic. Known to modern readers by way of the final, posthumous edition (1552), the Phantasia Macaronicon as the Baldus was titled in the 1521 'Toscolana' edition) was not only read by many of the most prominent Italian poets of its moment, but is alluded to and imitated by important writers operating outside of Italy's tightly-controlled borders, including Rabelais and Cervantes.

Heraldry is a well-defined and, almost by definition, narrow subject; a “feudal language,” with codified rules, attributes, and a history that has been told many times. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, it was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist, and the return to classical antiquity.

Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that heraldry as we know it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture. This was tied to the construction of the very concept of the Middle Ages. Our point of entry into the subject is a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). We approach the subject also from one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where Boiardo was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty.

Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its Renaissance reception are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a whole gamut of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by, the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies that eventually became known as philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them. However, the Este dynasty nourished a humanism that brought different resources to the task of organizing the signs inherited from the past. This dissertation is invested in studying these resources, and in bringing them to light as essential contributions to the humanist tradition in the broadest sense.

Abstract

Courtship, Violence, and the Formation of Marriage in the Early Modern Italian Novella Tradition

by

Sara Elizabeth Christina Russell

Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Albert R. Ascoli, Chair

This dissertation examines the intersection of courtship, violence, and the formation of marriage in early modern Italian legal and fictional narratives. My investigation begins with the marriage causae of Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum, more commonly known as the Decretum, then moves on to a selection of novellas from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and culminates in a series of close readings from Bandello's Novelle. My analysis of these texts reveals complexity and ambiguity in the representation of all stages of courtship and marriage formation in addition to depicting conflict between parents and offspring in the formation of marriage. Emphasizing the role of storytelling within canon law and the intrusion of legal systems (both real and fictional) into storytelling, my reading of coercion and violence is grounded in the broader historical context of courtship and marriage formation.

This study comments on the changes in canon law on marriage between 1140 and the Council of Trent; during this span of time, the increasing attention paid to the will of both the man and the woman involved in a potential courtship or marriage called for the differentiation between forced sex and clandestine relationships. The works of Gratian, Boccaccio, and Bandello, written in the twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth century, respectively, suggest a movement toward a growing acceptance of the definition of marriage based on consent and an increasing differentiation between consent and coercion to sex, abduction, and marriage.

Whereas other scholars have focused on identifying the narrators' or authors' attitudes or perspectives about women in general or violence more specifically, my dissertation undertakes the innovative task of analyzing the function of violence in relation to courtship and marriage. More specifically, I discuss the significance of Gratian's, Boccaccio's, and Bandello's depiction of the slippage between consent and coercion, which struggle against each other in these texts, yet remain so tightly interwoven that it is often difficult to untangle them. In the works of Gratian, Boccaccio and Bandello, the representation of coercion and violence underscores the importance of consent.

The following reading of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova (1744) employs a Machiavellian lens to illustrate how issues preventing political longevity and encouraging ever-proliferating contingencies are overcome epistemologically, not through atemporal Cartesian reason, but rather through a layered, trans-historical hermeneutics. Because Vico frequently references (both tacitly and explicitly) Niccolò Machiavelli and because the two thinkers have a common grounding in humanist studies, particularly in rhetoric, the present discussion will explore the ways in which they share a distinct worldview that defines history as the epistemological experience of the individual and places concerns for proper governance at its core.

A triadic interpretive schema will parse through three major thematic threads common to both Machiavellian and Vichean thought—advice; the individual; and communal laws—in order to analyze their three corresponding modes of argumentation—the visual, the metaphorical/poetical, and the legal—that are essential to substantiate the affinities and novelty of these two thinkers’ practical philosophies.

The Introduction will discuss Machiavelli and Vico’s similar peripheral location with respect to modernity as a means to establish the basis for their comparison. Specifically, the Introduction will explain why Machiavelli’s writings deepen comprehension of the Scienza nuova and the claim Vico puts forth within it of its innovation from his pro-Descartes contemporaries.

Chapter One, entitled “Allegorical Thinking and the Problem of Contingency,” will confront the difficulty of securing universally applicable praxes, as typified by the slippery counsel in Machiavelli’s Principe, and will analyze how Vico proposes a solution through the Scienza’s frontispiece. By foregrounding the rhetorical and interpretative techniques that enable allegory to link two levels of meaning—surface and hidden, poetical and philosophical—Chapter One will show how the Machiavellian prince anticipates the overcoming of temporal obstacles that is central to the reading and implementation of Vico’s science, particularly through the visualization of two moments in time.

Chapter Two, entitled “The Individual, the Collective, and the Fictions of Exemplarity,” analyzes the entity responsible for the resolution of contingency, moving from the individual to the many. Machiavelli, in his Vita di Castruccio Castracani, obliquely answers the question he proposes on the waning validity of the self as both model and propagator of continuity, overturning the efficacy of legacies according to filial succession for one based on interpretative ties. Chapter Two contends that Castruccio’s sayings look forward to the ways in which Vico argues Homer’s exemplarity as depending less on an individual’s merits and more on a collective representational impulse, with a person’s identity becoming the vehicle for the majority’s ideas, desires, and will.

Chapter Three, entitled “Legislating the Histories of Human Thinking,” brings together the allegorical and collective modes of thinking from Chapters One and Two, respectively, in order to demonstrate how both Machiavelli and Vico envision laws as essential to political stability and history as essential to practical philosophy. By comparing representations of legal processes and order in Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine and in the final two books of Vico’s Scienza, Chapter Three’s argument will highlight the core kinship between these two thinkers’ political theories as centered on the need to safeguard societies against change by using the very source of change itself—the human mind and its concrete, disembodied manifestations in society.

Abstract

Pastoral at the Boundaries:

The Hybridization of Genre in the Fourteenth-Century Italian Eclogue Revival

by

Jonathan David Combs-Schilling

Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Albert Russell Ascoli, Chair

This dissertation demonstrates that one of the principal aspects of pastoral is its identity as a metagenre by focusing attention on the Latin pastoral production of the fourteenth-century eclogue revival in Italy, and by integrating that production into larger estimations of pastoral's history. Long taken to be a closed circuit within, or a derivative offshoot of, the genre's long history, the eclogues of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio at once accentuated the metageneric elements of classical pastoral and influenced the future of pastoral representations through their consistent exploration of pastoral's boundary-crossing double move--an expansionary movement outward into the representational terrain of other genres and a recuperative (and incorporative) return to the fold.

My first chapter, "Dante's Two Reeds: Pastoral Hierarchies and Hybrids," examines Dante in terms of this double move, positions his eclogues at the origins of a new era of pastoral representation, and addresses why the first continuous tradition of pastoral production in the history of the genre begins with their 165 verses. I individuate one of the principal causes of their influence to be the epistolary context out of which they were forged. By sending his eclogues as letters to the protohumanist Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante harnesses the boundary-traversing movement of epistolarity and invests the metageneric movement of pastoral with a new critical thrust. With this new orientation, Dante utilizes the genre's self-figured humility to interrogate and overturn Giovanni's rigid distinctions between high and low literature and, in the systematically hybrid second eclogue, produces a pastoral fiction that is at once low and high.

There is both a vertical and a horizontal aspect to Dante's use of pastoral as metagenre, and though the two are conjoined, my next two chapters argue that Petrarch explores its vertical aspect through a methodical comparison with epic, while Boccaccio explores its horizontal aspect through a narratologically innovative breach of pastoral's diegetic horizon. In chapter 2, "Translatio bucolicorum: Pastoral and the Place of Epic in Petrarch's Bucolicum carmen," through an analysis of his first eclogue and his letters, in particular Familiares 21.15, I reveal that Petrarch conceived of his collection as a response to the letter that Giovanni had sent Dante, whereby he not only attempts to replace Dante as the originator of the pastoral revival but also figures his collection as an "answer" to Giovanni's request for a new Latin epic. In this light, I proceed to examine Petrarch's pervasive appropriation of epic tropes and strategies, in particular translatio imperii, as he extends the implications of Dante's high-low hybrid to pastoralize the book of epic, and in the process generates the first modern collection of eclogues.

In my third chapter, "Tending to the Boundary: Between Inner and Outer Pastoral in Boccaccio's Buccolicum carmen," I redress critical estimations of Boccaccio's usage of allegory in his eclogue collection to show that it is not a departure from "authentic" pastoral but rather works in concert with the other innovations he brings to the genre, most noticeably the sharp increase in dramatic movement within the eclogues and the narratological complexity deployed in the songs of their protagonists. By narrativizing the arrival of allegory to the landscape of pastoral, as well as its departure, Boccaccio drastically increases the genre's representational purview while also maintaining the autonomy of its fictions. This provokes a doubling of the landscape, which becomes mapped into two distinct but overlapping spaces: an inner pastoral, a more conventional Arcadian scene, and an outer pastoral, a liminal space where the genre encounters and pastoralizes the system of literature beyond its borders.

The cumulative effect of this inquiry is a two-fold recognition: first, while still respecting the distinctions between the pastoral poetics of the tre corone, we can meaningfully speak of the fourteenth-century eclogue revival as a movement; and, second, it was a movement that helped shape pastoral's future as a metagenre.