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Dante and Boccaccio: A Poetics of Textiles Julianna Van Visco Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Julianna Visco All Rights Reserved Abstract Dante and Boccaccio: A Poetics of Textiles Julianna Visco This dissertation examines the literary depiction of textiles and textile-adjacent objects in Dante’s Commedia and Boccaccio’s Decameron using a two-pronged approach: answering Barolini’s call to historicize and incorporating Smith’s approach to investigating materials and workshop practices. While being physically engaged with textiles is a universal experience, the Trecento Florentine was immersed in a textile-driven culture. Dante and Boccaccio’s deployment of textiles reflect and engage with this specific historical moment and geographic location. This project uses an exploration of the production practices, in other words a focus on the processes of making, as a lens for the text. Techniques, such as the hem, are a site of skilled practice; linking the physicality of craft production with the tacit knowledge of craftspersons. The dual-sidedness of textiles provides a material example of the recto/verso relationship inherent in cultural production. Dante, often using simile or metaphor, represents textiles in the Commedia to make spiritual and cosmic concepts more clear and comprehensible to his readership. Weaving, for Dante, is intricately connected to writing and provides a model for meditating on the process of making. Boccaccio locates, in the specific material conditions of the textile industry, categories—such as gender, occupation, and social status—with which he makes radical narrative choices in order to disrupt the essentializing nature of categories themselves. Finally, an exploration of wrapping and disintegration reveals the inexorable fate of textiles. Table of Contents List of Tables, Illustrations, Charts iii Acknowledgments iv Dedication v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Matter of Materials 20 1.1 Textile Industry 22 1.2 Materials 27 1.2.1 Linen 32 1.2.2. Wool 35 1.2.3 Silk 57 Chapter 2: Craftsmanship 72 2.1 The Generic Artisan 76 2.2 Skilled Practice 83 2.3 Tools, Techniques, and Work Roles 86 2.3.1 The Spindle and Spinning 88 2.3.2 The Needle and its Practitioners 105 2.3.2.1 Tailors 110 2.3.2.2 Sewing 118 i 2.3.3 The Hem 121 2.3.3.1 Lembo 123 2.3.3.2 Margini 128 2.3.3.3 Orlo 130 2.3.3.2 Vivagno 133 Chapter 3: (Un)Making Cloth: Becoming and Unbecoming 140 3.1 Dante and Tartar Cloths 145 3.2 Boccaccio and Tartar Cloths 168 3.2.1 Wrapping 173 3.3 Disintegration 178 Conclusion 184 References 188 ii List of Tables, Illustrations, Charts Table 1 Snapshot of Database 8 Table 2 Sample Chart 9 Figure 1 Raw Wool 28 Figure 2 Spindles 88 Chart 1 Hem Lexicon 122 Chart 2 Hem Meaning 123 Table 3 Language performing a seam 129 Chart 3 Hem Frequency 138 Figure 3 Lampas with phoenixes 156 iii Acknowledgments I would like to express gratitude to my advisor, Teodolinda Barolini, for her intellectual guidance, support, and encouragement. To be able to work with someone whose renowned scholarship is matched only by her grace and compassion is truly a gift. I would additionally like to thank my committee for their advice, critical feedback, and support over the course of this large project. It has been a pleasure to work with such a dream team of scholars and human beings. iv Dedication To my husband, Christopher, and amazing children, Serafina and Leonora, for reminding me what is truly important and for all of their love and support throughout this process. To my father, James Van Gelder, for insisting that there is a solution to every problem. v Introduction Weaving is a primordial practice and a universal language. Despite regional and temporal variations in raw materials, tools, and technology, the binary system undergirds all methods of weaving; a series of zeroes and ones, heddles up and heddles down. This system became the inspiration for modern day computing via Charles Babbage and Ava Lovelace. But punch cards did not institute something new. Rather, the application of punch cards only mechanized a previously established practice with the Jacquard loom, itself an innovation on previous practices. Moreover, we can go back millennia. Loom weights are commonly found in archaeological excavations in Europe and the Near East. There is evidence of warp- weighed looms from the Neolithic period, 6,500-12,000 years ago.1 In this sense, weaving is both a primitive and advanced technology. And the mathematical foundation upon which weaving is built obliterates many of the differences found in weaving practices across geography and time. The nomenclature around modern day computing finds its source in many Latin words associated with weaving.2 Even in our day-to-day speech the metaphors connecting weaving to narrative are inescapable: we talk about weaving a story, spinning a tale, or following a narrative thread. Text is connected to textile. The mathematical foundation of weaving underpins the common cognitive and embodied experiences of weavers and weaving pattern designers. 1 Barber reports weaving: “is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stockbreeding.” See Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with special reference to the Aegean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, 2. 2 Network and net are frequent examples. 1 This project will look at weaving language in the Commedia and the Decameron. Both historical data and a cognitive and physiological understanding of the embodied practice of weaving allow us to better decode weaving language in the Commedia and the Decameron, but the scope of this project is not limited to the single modality of weaving. Noting that the English derivation of the word “loom” from the Middle English lome originally referred to a tool or utensil, Tim Ingold provocatively asks: “Does this not suggest that to our predecessors, at least, the surface-building activity of weaving, rather than any of those activities involving the application of force to pre-existing surfaces, somehow epitomized technical processes in general?”3 Ingold describes three ways the skill of weaving can be broadened or likened to other craft skills. The practitioner operates within a field of forces set up through their engagement with material. The work consists not just of mechanical application of external force but rather of care, judgment and dexterity, and the action has a narrative quality: in other words every movement grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next.4 With its narrative component, it is the third skill that most captures the intrinsic relationship between text and textile. By accepting Ingold’s premise, we can cast a wider net in our object of study beyond the specific practice of weaving to include the practices of spinning, sewing, tailoring, and other elements of textile production because in this view weaving is the process, not only the end product. Ingold concludes that the weaving is the making. For literary scholars the text mediates the object. Because this project examines 3 Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Abingdon: Rutledge, 2000, 346. 4 Ibid., 347. 2 the textual evidence of gestures and signs pointing to material objects and practices, I would loosely define the titular poetics of textiles in this way: the weaving is the writing. Terza rima, the metrical form in which Dante wrote the Commedia, is described as an interlocking or weaving of words. Alan Wong writes: “Assigned prosodic as well as symbolic functions, terza rima in the Commedia is no mere embellishment. Prosodically, it gives the poem an interlocking unity in which lines, while resonating across the page, echo each other within each tercet.”5 One could make the textile comparison to embroidery, as an embellishment that exists on the surface, versus weaving or tapestry, where the design lives in and is constituted by the structure of the fabric. The rhyme word, like a weft, emerges in a tercet again only after it has been submerged in a rhythmic pattern by the warp of the preceding tercet. In contrast to Dante’s terza rima, Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in prose narrative. The structure of the Decameron, one of its primary features, has been the subject of much critical exegesis for almost seven hundred years. The framing techniques and motifs reveal another version of a woven structure. While not initially obvious, Dante’s Commedia is rich in textile content. There are silk worms, thread, needles and scissors, wool and silk, spinners, a tailor and cobbler, belts, gowns, and cloaks, all items loaded with semiotic content.6 Boccaccio fills his novelle with depictions of cloaks, gowns, purses, and veils but also lanaioli, merchants, spinners, and carders. Upon closer examination of these representations, I became increasingly curious about how the objects were made, by whom, and what the processes 5 Wong, Alan. When Theory and Practice Meet: Understanding Translation through Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, 263. 6 I am using Ingold’s terminology with “objects loaded with semiotic content.” See Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Abingdon: Rutledge, 2000, 347. 3 of making could reveal about the text. This dissertation thus functions as part of a larger project of bringing the material turn to medieval Italian literature. Just as an examination of materials has shifted and enriched the conversation in historical and art historical discourses, literary analysis can benefit from the application of the material turn to texts. Textiles inherently play a physical and emotional role for the consumer and producer and in this historical period of cultural transition textiles play a symbolic and economic role in the construction of Florentine identity.