ACCF LIIT 321 Italian Literature 1200 to 1500

ACCF LIIT 321 Italian Literature 1200 to 1500

Credits: 3 Prerequisites: None

Website Description This is a course in Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature. The main focus will be on Renaissance short tales (novelle), which will be read as a way to explore the societies and the cultural environment in which they were born. The object of the course will be short tales written by some of the most important prose writers of all times, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Masuccio Salernitano, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Niccolò Machiavelli, Matteo Maria Bandello, Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. Authors such as Dante and Petrarch, the most influential poets of Italian literature, will also be included in the first part of the syllabus.

The approach of the course is interdisciplinary, as it aims not only to give the students a good knowledge of early modern Italian literature, but also to stimulate critical thinking and a sensibility to all of the humanities, including the visual arts. The course will be taught in English. Likewise, primary sources will be in English. Questions on the language and the stylistic characteristics of the original texts, however, may be studied.

As the Arcadia Study-Abroad Program is set in Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance revolution (and many of the most renowned Italian writers and artists), the course will take advantage of some of the infinite possibilities offered by the city. In fact, visits to some of the ancient manuscript libraries of Florence and to their collections of old books are planned as an important part of the course. The course also includes walks around Florence, in order to link the texts read to the history and geography of Florence and surroundings. Extra-class activities of the same kind will be strongly encouraged.

During the course students will have to write papers on litteraty texts or on scholarly articles, in order to exercise their reading comprehension and improve their accademic writing.

Rationale and Impact of Course A study abroad program in Florence should have a serious course on Italy’s first great literary flowering. As opposed to a specialized course on Dante, the format suggested allows the course to embrace all “Three Crowns” of the 14C, extending it to the later Italian Renaissance. In this fashion it is possible to survey a greater variety of authors and literary forms, and to bring out connections to other figures and movements in European literature. The course would serve majors in Italian studies, English, and comparative literature. Since all students take Italian language, the course offers a wonderful opportunity to study masterpieces of Italian Literature.

Primary Learning Although this is a reading-intensive course, attempts are made to involve students with cultural activities in the rest of the city. These include public Dante readings or lectures, and drama. Typically, each semester AI hosts a recitation by memory from Dante, open to all students. Students are made familiar with study centers where some materials are available to them.

As far as possible, the literary topography of Florence is inscribed upon the experience of individual students, with walks in the center of Florence, to Fiesole, and in the countryside. Book and print culture may be the subject of another proposed course, but efforts would be made to get students to see early manuscripts and printed books in major collections. The Biblioteca Riccardiana seems the mostly likely to host such an initiative. Various research resources, which have fed and benefitted from a formidable scholarly tradition, are available and their utilization relates to (1) the level of a given student’s Italian and (2) whether regulations exclude undergraduates. Generally, public bibliographical tools allow relevant resources to be identified, located and accessed.

Country and Program Connection The words and thoughts of authors such as Dante and Machiavelli place the student at the intersection between Florentine, Italian and transnational culture. There should be an inquiry into these great accomplishments. These words and thoughts place the student inside a tradition of permanent values and vigorous debates. These values find more or less distant echoes in other courses in the program (Italian Language, Italian Style, Italy and the European Union); the more reason they should have full play here.

The course should act as a point of reference for other courses on local and Italian history and culture. The relationship between the Tuscan dialect and standard Italian is an important part of the region and the country's cultural history. It is important to ground the cultural prominence of Florence by close study of the seminal literary works. The notion of humanism returns in other courses and this one offfers a place to analyze it.

Requirements and Evaluation

1) ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION Attendance at classes and active participation in the discussion will be fundamental, and will be taken into account for the final grade. Necessary absences should be discussed beforehand or justified with a medical certificate. No more than two unexcused absences will be accepted: three unexcused absences will be penalized by a deduction from the student’s final grade, four absences will result in the exclusion from the final exam. If a student misses a class it will be his/her responsibility to find out what was assigned during the class and to collect the notes and the material given out that day. Students are expected to be on time for the class.

2) ORAL PRESENTATIONS Between meetings 2 and 21, students will make two oral presentations (10-15 minutes, on two different days to be agreed with the professor) on the secondary bibliography assigned for that day, or on a related topic to be agreed with the professor.

3) PAPERS Students are required to write four summaries (3-5 pages, double spaced, Times New Roman 12, standard margins, MS Word or RTF format) of scholarly articles, in order to improve their analysis and reading comprehension of these technical writings. Students are expected to work on these papers without any external help. Plagiarism of any kind will automatically earn a failing grade. Papers are due for the day stated in the “schedule” section of the syllabus (unless otherwise specified during the course), and are to be handed in hard copy at the beginning of the lesson. Papers sent by e-mail will be accepted only if received at least 24 hours before the beginning of the class, and will have to be sent both to the professor and to the to the academic director of Arcadia program, Florence. Each day of delay will count as a minus on the grade of the paper (ie. an A would become A-, an A- would become a B+, etc.). Four days of delay will result in a failing grade.

4) EXAMS There will be two exams: a Mid-Term (week 7) and a Final (week 14). The exams will be divided into three parts: a Y/N (or True/False) part (20% of the grade); a Multiple-choice part (30% of the grade); and an Essay part (50% of the grade)

5) GRADING Participation (including presentations) 40% Papers 20% Mid-Term examination 15% Final examination 25%

Required textbooks • Dante Alighieri, The Portable Dante, ed. and transl. M. Musa (New York: Penguin, 2003) • Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, translated by M. Musa and P. Bondanella (New York: Penguin, 2002) • L. Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet. Six Tales in Historical Context, transl. by Murtha Baca (New York: Marsilio, 1994) • Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare. Four early stories of star-crossed love, by Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi da Porto, Matteo Bandello and Pierre Boaistuau, ed. N. Prunster (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2000) • Course Reader

Bibliography

Periodicals Dante Studies Italian Studies Lettere Italiane Renaissance Quarterly

Selected monographs

Alighieri, D. The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, ed. and trans. Mark Musa Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. (in AI library)

Alighieri, D. Inferno, tr. Hollander (AI library)

Alighieri, D. Purgatorio, tr. Hollander (AI library)

Alighieri, D. The Portable Dante, ed. and transl. M. Musa. New York: Penguin, 2003. (in AI library)

Alighieri, D. Vita Nuova, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Oxford: OUP, 1992) (in AI library)

Allaire, G. (ed.) The Italian Novella, ed. by G. Allaire, New York - London, Routledge, 2003

Andrews, R. Scripts and scenarios: the performance of comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: CUP, 1993

Baldassarri, S.U. and Saiber, A. (comp. and intro.) Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. (in AI library)

Barolini, T. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, 1992.

Boccaccio, G. The Decameron, translated by M. Musa and P. Bondanella (New York: Penguin, 2002)

Boccaccio, G. The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam. London: Penguin, 1995. (AI library)

Branca, V. Boccaccio, The Man and His Works, trans. R. Monges and D.J. McAuliffe. New York: New York UP, 1976.

Brand, P. and Pertile, L. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Italian Literature. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Castiglione B., ed. Javitch, D. The Book of the Courtier. New York,: Norton, 2002.

Conway Bondanella, J. and Musa, M. (eds.) The Italian Renaissance Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 (in AI library)

Copenhaver, B.P. and Schmitt, C.B. Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford: 1992 [repr. 2002] (in AI library)

Davis, C.T. Dante’s Italy and other essays. Philadelphia, 1984.

Dombroski, R.S. Critical perspectives on the Decameron. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976

Freccero, J. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion Conversion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986 (in AI library)

Grendler, P.l F., Critics of the Italian World (1530-1560): Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco and Ortensio Lando, Madison, 1969.

Gundersheimer, W.L. The Italian Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1993

Hainsworth, P. Petrarch the Poet. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

Herrick, M T. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance, Urbana, 1960

Hollander, R. Allegory in Dante's Commedia. Princeton, 1969.

Holmes, G. Florence, Rome and the origins of the Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Jacoff, R. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Kristeller, P.O. Renaissance Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Kirkham, V. The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction. Florence: Olschki, 1993

Kohl, B.G., Witt, R.G., Welles, E.B. (ed. and trans), Witt, R.G. (intro.) The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978

Kraye J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Machiavelli, N. The Prince, trans. George Bull, intro. Anthony Grafton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Mann, N. Petrarch. Oxford, 1984.

Martines, L. An Italian Renaissance Sextet. Six Tales in Historical Context, transl. by Murtha Baca, New York, Marsilio, 1994 (AI library)

Mazzotta, G. The Worlds of Petrarch (Duke University Press, 1993)

Mazzotta, G. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; 1987.

Mazzotta, G. The World at Play: A Study of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Mazzotta, G. Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Murphy, J.J. (ed.) Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, Berkeley, 1983

Norton, G. P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 2: The Renaissance, Cambridge1999

Penman, B. (ed. and trans.) Five Italian Renaissance Comedies. Penguin, 1978

Petrarch. Canzoniere, ed. A. Mortimer, Penguin, 2002 (AI library)

Petrarch. Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, ed. M. Musa, Oxford, 1985 (AI library)

Prunster, N. (ed.) Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare. Four early stories of star-crossed love, by Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi da Porto, Matteo Bandello and Pierre Boaistuau. Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2000

Richardson, B. Print culture in Renaissance Italy, Cambrdige 1994

Salingar, L. Shakespeare and the traditions of Comedy, Cambridge 1974

Salutati, C. The Rape of Lucrece, trans. Stephanie Jed, in ead., Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987.

Trinkaus, C. Petrarch and the formation of Renaissance consciousness (Yale, 1979)

Wilkins, E.H. Studies on Petrarch and Boccaccio. Padua: Antenore, 1978

Course Outline

(readings are to be prepared for the day indicated): N.B. “B/P”= Brand, P. and Pertile, L. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Italian Literature. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

I 1. Introduction to the course. Introduction to Dante: his life and works. The Divina Commedia.

I 2. 01-17th Dante, Inferno I, III, V.

II 1. 01-22nd Dante, Inferno X, XIII, XXVI, XXXII. Secondary bibliography: A. Mandelbaum, Dante in His Age, in Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans. A Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), pp. 319-340 (Reader).

II 2. 01- 24th Dante Secondary bibliography: J. Freccero’s forward to The Inferno of Dante, trans. R. Pinsy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. XI-XIX (Reader).

III 1. 01-29th Dante, Purgatorio I-II; Paradiso I, III, XXXIII.

III 2. 01-31rst Petrarch, Introduction to his life and works. Letter to Posterity and Ascent of Mont Ventoux (Reader).

IV 1. 02-05th Petrarch, Selection from the Canzoniere: 1, 16, 35, 52, 90, 106, 126, 128, 129, 267, 273, 293, 365 (Reader). Secondary bibliography: A. Mortimer, Introduction to his edition of Petrarch, Canzoniere, tr. A. Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. XI-XXXII (Reader). PAPER I: Summary of R. Kirkpatrick, “Canto V”, in id., Dante’s Inferno (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), pp. 76-95 (Reader).

IV 2. 02-07th Boccaccio, Introduction to his life and works. The Decameron: Author’s Prologue and Introduction. Secondary bibliography:, pp. P.D. Stewart, Boccaccio, in B/P, pp. 70-88 (Reader).

V 1. 02-12ve Boccaccio, Decameron, Day I, tales 1, 2, 3, 4; Day II, tales 5, 9. Secondary bibliography: C. Caporello-Szykman, The Historical Development of the Novella and Ead., Boccaccio’s Revolution in Short Narrative, in The Boccaccian Novella. The Creation and Waning of a Genre (New York . Bern – Frankfurt – Paris: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 29-55 (Reader).

V 2. 02-14th Boccaccio, Decameron, Day III tales 1, 9, 10; Day IV, Introduction and tale 1.

VI 1. 02-19th Boccaccio, Decameron, Day IV, tale 5; Day V, tales 1, 8; Day VI 7, 10; VII tale 7. Secondary bibliography: C. Caporello-Szykman, Boccaccio and the Theory of the Novella, The Cornice in the Novella, in The Boccaccian Novella cit., pp. 57-80.

VI 2. 02-21rst Boccaccio, Decameron, Day VIII, tales 3, 6; IX tales 3, 5, 6; Day X, tale 10. Secondary bibliography: C. Caporello-Szykman, The Cornice in the Novella, in The Boccaccian Novella cit., pp. 81-106.

th VII 1. 03-5 REVIEW. PAPER II: Summary of G. Mazzotta, “Plague and Play”, in The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986), pp. 13-46 (Reader).

th VII 2. 03-7 MID-TERM EXAM. VIII 1. The Renaissance. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of man (Reader). Secondary bibliography: L. Panizza, Humanism, in B/P, pp. 131-151 (Reader); Selection from Literature in the Vernacular (B/P 152-159) (Reader).

VIII 2. Antonio Manetti, The Fat Woodcarver (Martines pp. 171-212). PAPER III: Summary of Who Does He Think He Is? The Fat Woodcarver (Martines 213-241).

IX 1. Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Ricciarda (Martines pp. 19-24); Piero Veneziano (?), Bianco Alfani (Martines 95-116). Secondary bibliography: L. Martines, The Real in the Imaginary: Ricciarda (Martines pp. 25-35); Id., The Wages of Social Sin: Bianco Alfani (Martines pp. 117-137)

IX 2. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Giacoppo (Martines 141-152). Secondary bibliography: L. Martines, A Patriotic Prank: Giacoppo (Martines pp. 153-167).

X 1. The Cinquecento. Machiavelli, Belfagor (Reader). Readings from The Prince (Reader). Secondary bibliography: B. Richardson, The Cinquecento. Prose, in B/P pp. 181-196 and 220-231 (Reader).

X 2. Agnolo Firenzuola, tale 7 (Reader); Matteo Maria Bandello, tale III 17 (Reader). Secondary bibliography: E. Gardiner, Introduction to Tales of Firenzuola, (New York: Italica Press, 1987) pp. XIII-XXVIII (Reader).

XI 1. Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi (Reader). Secondary bibliography: J.C. Bondanella – P. Bondanella, Introduction to G. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists (New York: Oxford U.P., 1998), pp. VII-XIV (Reader).

XI 2. Benvenuto Cellini. Readings from The Autobiography (Reader). Secondary bibliography: G. Bull, Introduction to The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. VII-XVI (Reader).

XII 1. Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance I: Romeo and Juliet (Giovanni da Porto, La Giulietta: cfr. bibliography). PAPER IV: TBA.

XII 2. Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance I: Romeo and Juliet (Matteo Maria Bandello, tale II 9: cfr. bibliography).

XIII 1. Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance II: The Otello (Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, The Moor of Venice - Reader).

XIII 2. Review.

rst XIV 1. 05-21 FINAL EXAM

IMPORTANT: The schedule and contents of some of the readings may be changed in order to better fit the students’ needs and interests. Thus, it will be the students’ responsibility to ascertain what material has been covered during each lesson; therefore, if a class is missed, it is up to the student to be informed of the contents of the lecture and the new assignments, and to get any handouts that were given out.

Visits to libraries or museums will be scheduled according to their availability.