Petrarch and Boccaccio Mimesis

Petrarch and Boccaccio Mimesis Romanische Literaturen der Welt Herausgegeben von Ottmar Ette Band 61 Petrarch and Boccaccio The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World Edited by Igor Candido An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The Open Access book is available at www.degruyter.com. ISBN 978-3-11-042514-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041930-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041958-0 ISSN 0178-7489 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Igor Candido, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Konvertus, Haarlem Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Dedicated to Ronald Witt (1932–2017) Contents Acknowledgments IX Igor Candido Introduction 1 H. Wayne Storey The Formation of Knowledge and Petrarch’s Books 15 Karl Enenkel Sacra solitudo. Petrarch’s authorship and the locus sacer 52 Ronald Witt Petrarch, Creator of the Christian Humanist 65 Christopher Celenza Petrarch and the History of Philosophy 78 Joachim Küpper The Secret Life of Classical and Arabic Medical Texts in Petrarch’s Canzoniere 91 Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden From Paradox to Exclusivity: Dante and Petrarch’s Lyrical Eschatologies 129 Igor Candido Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio on Religious Conversion 153 Gerhard Regn The Incipit of the Decameron: Textual Margins as an Index of Epochal Change 176 Andreas Kablitz The Proemio of the Decameron. Boccaccio’s Hidden Dialogue with Scholasticism 194 VIII Contents Francesco Ciabattoni Boccaccio’s Novel Hecuba: Beritola between Ovid and Dante 209 Marco Petoletti Boccaccio, the Classics and the Latin Middle Ages 226 Paolo Cherchi The Inventors of Things in Boccaccio’s De genealogia deorum gentilium 244 Giuseppe Mazzotta Boccaccio’s Critique of Petrarch 270 Giorgio Ficara The Perfect Woman in Boccaccio and Petrarch 286 Renzo Bragantini Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Space of Vernacular Literature 313 Giulio Ferroni Between Petrarch and Boccaccio: Strategies of the End 340 Contributors 367 Index of Manuscripts 373 Index Nominum 375 Acknowledgments The idea of this volume was born from my research at the Freie Universität Berlin as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and took further shape in the form of a conference held at the Freie in June of 2014, entitled The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World: Petrarch and Boccaccio between the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. From this first fruitful meeting with the scholars convened in Berlin, the project developed much more fully, giving life to a con tribution to the studies of Petrarch and Boccaccio which, with due regard to its diverse critical voices, can be considered organic. Here I would like to thank: the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the generous financial support provided for the conference; the Dahlem Humani ties Center, in the person of Joachim Küpper, the Italienzentrum der FUB, in the persons of Bernhard Huss and Sabine Greiner, for financial and intellectual support; the Italian ambassador to Berlin, H. E. Elio Menzione, who honored us with his hospitality at the embassy and with his presence at the opening of the conference; Eef Overgaauw, Director of the manuscripts division of the Staats bibliothek zu Berlin, and Giuliano Staccioli for organizing the splendid exhibi tion of Petrarchan and Boccaccian manuscripts in the Berlin library. I am grateful to Bridget Pupillo, a friend and colleague from the years of my doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who translated several of the contributions into English and provided many attentive editorial suggestions. A heartfelt thank you goes to the publisher Walter De Gruyter in the person of Ulrike Krauss, Christine Henschel and Gabrielle Cornefert, for having faith in this publication and for having seen it through all of its many stages with great professionalism and patience; thanks as well to Ottmar Ette for having welcomed it into the series Mimesis. This volume is dedicated to the memory of a great humanist, Ronald Witt, who delivered his final public presentation in Berlin and who left us last March. After our meeting on the occasion of the Berlin conference, he was a great source of inspiration for me, both in my studies and in life itself. I like to recall his emotion at seeing, one last time, the autograph of Petrarch’s De ignorantia preserved at the Staatsbibliothek. It was his own way of saying farewell to that old friend. Igor Candido Introduction The second volume of Ernst Cassirer’s Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuren Zeit (1922) opens with an analysis of the Cartesian problem of the unity of knowledge. For the French philosopher, all the sciences together constitute a single system of human knowledge which does not change, however diverse might be the specific subjects to which it is applied. The argument completely transforms the relationship between the unity and multiplicity of knowledge. This change occurs primarily with respect to natural philosophy, in relation to which Descartes affirms that it would be folly to speculate on the mysteries of nature and on the influence of the celestial spheres over the ter- restrial world, on the virtues of the plants, on the movement of the stars and the transformation of metals, without ever having reflected deeply on the correct use of the mind and on the universal concept of knowledge itself: indeed, all other matters are to be considered not in and of themselves, but for that express purpose (Regulae I and VIII).1 In very similar terms, approximately three hundred years prior, Petrarch directed his satire against four Averroist doctors and their natural philosophy in the De ipsius et multorum ignorantia: “What use is it, I ask, to know the nature of beasts and birds and fish and snakes, and to ignore or neglect our human nature, the purpose of our birth, or whence we come whither we are bound?”2 The conceptual affinity is surprising, just as it is fascinating to imagine Descartes as reader not only of Cicero and Augustine but also of the famous Petrarchan invective. In any case, the possible connection certainly did not escape Cassirer, editor along with Paul O. Kristeller and John H. Randall, Jr. of the famous volume The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (1948), in which he records the De ignorantia among the fundamental philosophical texts of the new era.3 But even more important than the individual passage in itself is the fact of its insertion into a cohesive corpus of texts which reveal the striking moder- nity of Petrarch’s thought. According to a great historian of Humanism, Hans Baron, Petrarch was a sort of Moses figure straddling the Middle Ages and the 1 See Ernst Cassirer: Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuren Zeit. Berlin: Verlag Bruno Cassirer 19223. Erster Band: p. 442–443. 2 Francesco Petrarca: Invectives. Edited and Translated by David Marsh. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2003 (The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 11), p. 239. 3 Francesco Petrarca: On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others. In: Ernst Cassirer/ Paul O. Kristeller et al.: The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1956, p. 47–133. Open access. © 2018 Igor Candido, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110419306-001 2 Igor Candido Renaissance, able to catch sight of the new Promised Land but unable to set foot in it.4 Baron’s greatest student, Ronald Witt, among the contributors to this volume, instead viewed Petrarch as a third-generation humanist, active after the first pioneering wave of Paduan Humanism which included Lovato dei Lovati and Albertino Mussato, a humanist whose historical role was that of steering the movement toward Christianity from its secular origins through an ideal syn- thesis of pagan Classicism and new Christian culture.5 A historical role defined also by spiritual exigencies – whether real or hypothetical matters little – begin- ning from the refusal to take part in a cultural world with which Petrarch did not wish to identify himself, as testified in the famous letter Posteritati, leading to his own internal crisis and his attempt to give unity and coherence to the sparse fragments of the soul, as suggested by the title of the Canzoniere itself, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and the conclusion of the Secretum, which represents the most refined analysis and the most carefully conceived theorization of the crisis transcribed within the poetic collection. The same argument must be made today for Giovanni Boccaccio, though an important and primarily Italian critical tradition has viewed Boccaccio

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