The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England

Conclusion: Far Sites, Father Sites, Farther Sites

The diversity of interests among early modern commentators on the Rime sparse had reaped a rich harvest. The loyalty of Antonio da Tempo, Francesco Filelfo, and Girolamo Squarzafico to the sovereign courts of northern Italy focused their attention on Petrarch’s attitudes toward Ghibelline ideals. The historicizing efforts of Vellutello gave perspective to Petrarch’s residence in southern France and northern Italy and to his frequent travels throughout Europe and the Empire. The rhetorical approaches of Gesualdo, Sylvano da Venafro, and Bernardino Daniello located Petrarch within ancient and early modern culture as one who processed and absorbed classical, Christian, medieval, and contemporaneous thought on politics, society, and art. The proto-Protestant sympathies of Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli, and Castelvetro finally attributed to Petrarch a resistance to the universalism of papal Christendom and a forecast of the particularisms of would-be national states emerging in sixteenth-century Europe. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe that received Petrarch’s Rime sparse with this commentary was animate with varying forms of national sentiment, particularly among the ruling elite and the merchant and professional classes increasingly exposed to foreign contacts. Less than a decade before Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, John Barclay (1582‒1621), a Scottish nobleman who aspired under James I to an ambassadorship in France, published a Latin essay on the attributes of different nations in Europe, Icon Animorum (1614, translated into French as L’Examen des esprits in 1617 and from French into English as The Mirror of Minds in 1633). Its argument pro251 Conclusion Far Sites, Father Sites, Farther Sites ceeds from the assumption “that there is a proper Spirit to every Region, which doth in a manner shape the studies and manners of the Inhabitants” (26).1 By assembling such loci of national differences, Barclay hopes to provide a rhetorical handbook for fellow diplomats to assess the temperaments of their foreign counterparts, “then from the Genius of diuers Nations to bee so informed , as to know how to behaue our selues in different countries, and what from euery place to expect or feare” (40). The Icon deepens a rhetorical inventory of cross-cultural comparisons formed by such ancients as Herodotus and Tacitus and such early moderns as Ravisus Textor, whose Specimen epithetorum (1518) characterizes older societies; Baldassare Castiglione, whose Book of the Courtier (1528) offers obiter dicta on contemporaneous Italian, French, and Spanish differences; Juan Huarte, whose Examen de los ingenios (1575) appraises Spain’s geography, climate, and temperamental humors; Jean Bodin, whose Republic (1575) tabulates the attributes of other modern nations in similar terms; and Michel de Montaigne, whose Journal of a Voyage to Italy (1580‒81) compares French and Italian idiosyncrasies and relates them to those of other peoples in the ancient and sixteenth -century worlds. Barclay’s Icon arranges such topics for practical use, pausing not for a single moment to doubt the Germans’ “loue of drinking” (107), the Italians’ “obsequiousnesse and curtesie” (147), the Spaniards’ “supercilious pride” (165), and the Turks’ “rustike and base nature, not worthy of liberty ” (208).2 Its publication in Latin, French, and English attests to the grip of national stereotypes upon the European imagination.3 Most of Barclay’s discussion would have surprised Petrarch. In the latter’s lifetime, only France, of all the emerging nation-states considered in this book, displayed any recognizable sense of corporate identity. As a noncontiguous kingdom that embraced chiefly the Île de France, Normandy, Touraine, Limousin , and parts of Languedoc, it bore only a shadowy resemblance to today’s hexagon. But the French monarchy had long thought of itself as an administrative entity ruling with unbroken continuity since the sixth century, when Clovis imposed his rule on the Paris basin, and French people thought of themselves as a collectivity, despite social, cultural, ethnic, and historical differences among them. Spain fixed its unity in the second half of the fifteenth century , when the Castilian and Aragonese kingdoms combined and expelled from Iberia Jewish and Islamic extranjeros. England, despite the unarguable demarcation of its insular boundaries and, since the eleventh century, the endurance of its Plantagenet monarchy, was a patchwork of feuding baronies in intermittent civil war until the Tudors stabilized the kingdom. States on the Conclusion 252 northern and eastern borders of Europe such as Denmark, Sweden, and Russia had longer histories of administrative continuity than England, while Portugal had a longer-lived monarchy...