In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian
literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its "three
crowns" Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of
Italian literary culture through four prisms: the
ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the
structural/formal, and the social.
The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire
from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in
philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as
heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions
(with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze
the narrative character of Dante's Vita nuova, Petrarch's lyric
sequence, and Boccaccio's Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural
implications of the editorial history of Dante's rime and at what sparso
versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on
gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women's use and
instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio--but not by
Petrarch--were more progressive than the courtly style for which the
Italian tradition is celebrated.
Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in "Dante and the
Lyric Past" to Petrarch's regressive stance on gender in "Notes toward a
Gendered History of Italian Literature"--and encompassing, among others,
Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d'Arezzo--these
sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture
of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways
that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
