Dante Tenzonante Savannah Cooper-Ramsey Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 ã 2020 Savannah Cooper-Ramsey All Rights Reserved Abstract Dante Tenzonante Savannah Cooper-Ramsey This dissertation offers a narrative reading of Dante’s use of the poetic form of the tenzone. I frame Dante’s tenzoni within the history of the form’s use in the Italian vernacular tradition, beginning with Giacomo da Lentini and the scuola siciliana. The practice of writing tenzoni in the Italian tradition ends with Dante, contemporaneous to the beginnings of the Commedia. Through close readings of Dante’s tenzoni, I explore how Dante shapes culture and issues social criticism dialogically. Ultimately, I argue that the form of the tenzoni was fundamental both to Dante’s ethical development and to the codification of the vernacular, leading to the first epic poem in the Italian language. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Chapter 1 -- A Poetaster’s Purpose: Dialogism and Dante’s Tenzoni 1 1. In the land of dreamy dreams: Dante’s first lyric poem 2. Dante Tenzonante 3 3. Manuscripts and Scribes: transmission and reception 10 4. Dante’s Lyric Corpus 13 5. Methodology and Motive 17 6. FORM: towards a tenzone taxonomy 19 7. Tenzone as gioco 27 8. Dante’s Signifying Style 35 Chapter 2 -- The Paradox of Poetry: Naming as a Transitive Act 44 Dante Alighieri’s tenzone with Dante da Maiano 1. Incipit Dante 2. Assaying Authorship: the stakes of the game 52 3. Spitting Rhymes – authorship in action 59 4. Ineffability: intertext in dialogue 66 5. Mic Drop: Resonant Silence 73 6. Courtly Re-vision 78 7. Interpreter of Maladies 83 8. Not Naming Thematized: from the tenzoni to the Commedia 85 9. A Rose By Any Other Name 89 Chapter 3 -- Boats, Roses, Beloveds, and Other Hypothetical Vessels 93 Dante’s tenzone with Guido Cavalcanti 1. A Visionary is Born 2. Bodies Unbound 99 3. Cavalcanti’s Agreeable Disagreement 113 4. Poetics in question: the “what is?” and “what if?” 119 5. Father Philosophy 123 6. Tautologies of Difference 139 7. Intermezzo: a meditation on ontology. 142 8. Lyric: “Real Talk” 143 9. Il libello della memoria: Body, Name, Life Anew 146 Chapter 4 -- To Forese with Love and Squalor: 149 Dante’s tenzone with Forese Donati 1. Echoes in the Streets 2. The Fictive Female Voice in the Lyric Tradition 159 3. Trees, Stomachs and the Knots Fathers 162 4. Neighbors and mirrors 171 5. Dis-honor: crudeness in legitimacy 176 Chapter 5 – The Importance of the tenzone within the Italian Tradition 181 Bibliography 183 Acknowledgements I thank Teodolinda Barolini, my advisor, for her mentorship and guidance. She shares her practice of close reading so openly with her students and has the keenest ear. Her interest in Dante’s lyric lead me to the tenzoni, and her continued scholarship has motivated me to see this project through to a conclusion. I am grateful for her insight and a decade’s worth of invaluable conversations. Thank you also to my committee members for their support and engagement. Thank you to Jo Ann Cavallo for her rigor, honesty, and encouragement. Thank you to Elizabeth Leake for many talks on gender and for her sense of humor. Thank you to Fabian Alfie for his work on the comic tradition, which inspired many of this dissertation’s questions, and for his willingness to come aboard. Thank you, also, to Julie Van Peteghem for her friendship my first year at Columbia and for being an excellent example for her fellow Dantisti. Thank you to my many Professors of Italian: to Maria Nicoletti for teaching me the language and encouraging my travels; to her partner, John Ahern, for his scholarship on dialogue, for cheerily serving on my MPhil committee, and for raising the question of voice; to Joseph Luzzi and Nina Cannizzaro for allowing me to read expansively; to Olivia Holmes for directing me to the early vernacular and reading many drafts of my work; and, finally, to Paolo Valesio for his kindness and creativity, and for discussing comics over coffee in Bologna. I am very fortunate to have been in classroom spaces with peers and colleagues in Columbia’s Italian Department. Thank you to Federica Franzè for helping me to grow as a pedagogue and for her willingness to write recommendations. Thank you to Lani Muller for keeping me on top of things. i Thank you to Davide Bolognesi, Patrizio Ceccagnoli, Nicola di Nino, Mathew Hacker, Grace de Molino, Alessia Palanti, and Jenny Rhodes for sharing of their lives, passions and intellect. To Akash & Jess Kumar, Humberto Ballesteros & Evelyn Ochoa and family, the conviviality of their friendship saw me through this process. And to Luke Rosenau, thank you for reading Dante together. Thank you to my students, for their enthusiasm, commitment to critical thinking, and the clarity of their perspectives. Thank you to the Art Department Collective, and the Philadelphia climbing and poetry communities for helping to ground me during the final years of this project. Thank you to Vernita Hall for her work, and for editing mine. To Matt Blanchard, Matt Wellins, and Marc Washington, thank you for reading and encouraging me in this PhD. Thank you to Sarah Cullen, Kate Beschen, Summer J. Hart, my brother, Eamon R. Shoff and their families for always being there. Thank you to my incredible nephews. Finally, thank you to Hayley Gresens and Kristine Unsworth for offering me the warmth and constancy of their home, and for believing in me this last year. ii For my parents Greg, Lynn, Jane, Bill, and for Aunt Mary iii CHAPTER 1 - A Poetaster’s Purpose: Dialogism and Dante’s tenzoni 1. In a land of dreamy dreams: Dante’s first lyric poem Dante demonstrates the active creation of authorial community as a visibly intentional and self-conscious effort throughout his writings: from the second book of the De vulgari eloquentia in which he assiduously constructs and codifies a lineage for the vernacular Italian via a survey of the genres which it constitutes, to the tender rendering of poets in conversation about their craft in Purgatorio XXI-XXVI, Dante is a writer ever-mindful of the fact of his future reception who writes himself into a literary tradition through dialogue with other authors. 1 The tradition of tenzone stems from the Latin conflictus, which influenced the provencal tenso, and then in turn shaped the contrasti of the scuola siciliana. The dialogic function inherent to the form affords young Dante the opportunity to literally ‘put himself out there,’ to refine his authorship in direct engagement with fellow poets, to hone his poetic discourse. The search for dialogisms in a modified Bakhtianian sense (i.e. intertextuality) in Dante’s literary production and among his textual precedents (theological, mythological, philosophical, and historical), and philological studies of the complex transmission and reception of Dante’s works comprise the majority of contemporary Dante scholarship. Yet, dialogue motivates nearly all the narrative action in his terza rima poetic trilogy. In fact, any reader of the Commedia risks getting lost in the labyrinth of potential and actual dialogisms, so lost that we neglect to connect Dante’s imagined 1 For example, see Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984) and Olivia Holmes, “Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’” in Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis, MN, 2000): 120-144. 1 direct discourse to the extant examples of the poet’s real-life dialogues: the thread of sonnets he exchanged with his literary contemporaries. Dante’s tenzoni demonstrate his ethical development in poetics and in practice. Therefore, this dissertation offers a reading of the form, in the socio- historical context of the Italian vernacular, along the timeline of Dante’s life. In the 1280s, a young and as-of-yet unknown poet Dante Alighieri penned Savete giudicar vostra ragione in reply to a pastoral vision, Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone, authored by Dante da Maiano. This act of intra-poetic public dialogue initiated a tenzone comprising eleven sonnets, five of which are among the earliest surviving lyrics of the Commedia’s author.2 Provedi, saggio, begins with a request for interpretation; Dante da Maiano describes a vision and begs an interpretative response from his audience: “Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone, / e per mercé ne trai vera sentenza” (vv. 1-2). The poet received seven separate replies to his tenzone in total, responded to two, and extended the tenzone with only one interlocutor: Alighieri. The directness of their debates renders the in-process, early negotiation of the practice and consequence of love poetry in the Italian vernacular tradition accessible to the contemporary readership. Furthermore, as dialogues, the tenzoni perform Dante Alighieri’s passage from the courtly tradition to the Commedia. My dissertation aims to characterize Dante tenzonante, and to read the tenzoni as markers of Dante’s ethical and poetic construction. Comprising approximately 20% of his lyric production, the tenzoni testify to the importance of dialogue in Dante’s early refinement. In the Commedia, Dante insured the consistency of his character via the discursivity of two guides (Virgil and Statius) and a woman (Beatrice); thus, the distinction between ‘Dante pilgrim’ and ‘Dante poet’ is made through dialogue. He later returns to fictive poetic dialogue with Virgil in his bucolic, unfinished Eclogues. 2 For a deeper explanation of the position of these sonnets in Dante’s lyric corpus, see Teodolinda Barolini, ed., Rime giovanilli e della Vita Nuova (Milan: BUR, 2009): 51-80 and Dante’s Lyric Poetry, Poems of Youth and the Vita Nuova (1283-1292), Trans.