After Petrarch, communal commitment

In the Trattatello in Laude di Dante, Boccaccio not only invents the letter from the pseudo-Ilario to Uguccione della Faggiola that he claims to have transcribed, as Giuseppe Billanovich showed as early as 1949; he also imposes the legend of the triple dedication of the Dantesque Comedy (Hell to Uguccione della Faggiola, Purgatory to Moroello Malaspina, Paradise to Frederick II). Extending and displacing Carlo Ginzburg's hypotheses, the lecture proposes a historical interpretation that involves redefining the seigniorial experience in terms of structural regularities, political grammar and local contexts. It culminates in an analysis of the controversy between Boccaccio and Petrarch over the Dantesque past(Familiares, XXI, 15: May 1359), which first concerns the debate on communal commitment. When Petrarch negotiates with his distant precursors, he foreshadows the politics of the future - and in particular the curialization of government in the Quattrocento. But the historical sociology of literary producers can only go so far: the survey is hampered by the impossible group portrait of the authors of the novellistica, beyond the emblematic case of Franco Sachetti. Paradoxically, the authors' political commitment is also an aspiration towards a fictitious aristocracy.

Contents

• "Unfortunately, the generous men for whom these things had been written in better times, had now abandoned the liberal arts to the plebeians" (letter from pseudo-Ilario to Uguccione della Faggiola)
• The seigniorial experience: structural regularities, political grammar, local contexts
• In Pisa: a discontinuous, gradual history
• The Zibaldone Laurenziano and the "leggenda dantesca del Boccacio" (Giuseppe Billanovitch)
• Boccaccio and the Trattatello in laude di Dante : to love in the Comedy "the richness of the text in artifice, the multitude of stories, the sublimity of the meanings hidden beneath the poetic veil"
• The legend of the triple dedication (Hell to Uguccione della Faggiola, Purgatory to Moroello Malaspina, Paradise to Frederick II): the political reasons for a literary fiction
• The bivium : Albertino Mussato and Dante in 1311 and 1316
• Cangrande della Scala after Giovanni Villani: questi fu il maggior tiranno e 'll più possente e ricco che fosse in Lombardia da Azzolino da Romano infino allora (X, 138), valente tiranno e signore da bene [...] e amico del nostro Comune (X, 95)
• Poetic coup de force, political transgression and privilegium : "Indeed, those who draw their strength from intellect and reason, and who have received the divine gift of freedom, are not subject to any use; and we should not be surprised, for they are not inspired by the laws, but it is they who inspire the laws" (Dante,Epistle to Cangrande dalla Scala)
• "As I read these sentences, I thought I heard Boccaccio's voice whispering in my ear: 'Ser Ciappelletto, it's me '" (Carlo Ginzburg, "L'épître à Cangrande et ses deux auteurs", Po&sie, 2008)
• Life and manners of François Pétrarque, Florentine : stories of admiration and rivalry (1343-1353)
• Petrarch in Milan, Auri sacra fames (Aeneid, III, 57)
• Letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio (Familiares, XXI, 15: May 1359)
• "Those who say I seek to diminish his fame are lying"
• A moment of truth:"And who can envy him who does not envy Virgil, unless he envies the applause and raucous clamor of thefullonum et cauponum et lanistarum(fullonum and cauponum and lanistarum) and of all those people whose praise is actually an offense, so much so that I congratulate myself, along with Virgil himself and Homer, on finding myself deprived of it: I know well what the praise of the uncultured is worth to cultured people"
• Petrarch, La Vie solitaire et l'art du placement (Étienne Anheim)
• From hatred of the people to hatred of intellectuals: "They're the ones who walk all over town, like an old trinket for sale, their cultured foolishness"
• Letters to posterity (Familiares, XXIV) as political fiction: "But what madness has driven you against Antoine? Love of the Republic, I think, which you admitted had already collapsed from top to bottom" (Petrarch to Cicero)
• Negotiating with distant precursors, foreshadowing future politics: the curialization of government in the Quattrocento
• The impossible group portrait of Tuscan novellistica authors and the destabilization of the authorial function: from Gentile Sermini to pseudo-Sermini (Monica Marchi)
• Franco Sacchetti during the "War of the Eight Saints" (1375-1378): Florence defensor libertatis
• Io scrittor : writing, collecting and composing the Trecentonovelle
• Franco Sacchetti, civic engagement and the frustrations of a political career: the literary scoundrel of the "Rousseau du ruisseau"?
• Conversely, Giovanni Sercambi and the buon governo of the seigniory
• Selling the wick: Sartrean commitment, social downgrading and the aspiration to a fictitious aristocracy (Ronan de Calan, La littérature pure. Histoire d'un déclassement, 2017)