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  • Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition
  • Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers
Baranski, Zygmunt G. and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., eds, Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies), Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009; paperback; pp. 432; R.R.P. US$50.00; ISBN 9780268022112.

The work of Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch, 1304-74) influenced important European Renaissance writers such as Pietro Bembo, Torquato Tasso, Pierre Ronsard, Etienne Jodelle, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and many others. Yet their verses often reveal the nature of this obligation to be dark and ambivalent; poets tend to minimize Petrarch's influence through direct criticism, even as they acknowledge, by the very act of writing within Petrarchan confines, that it must be honoured. The challenge for all who followed Petrarch's footsteps was to prove their poetic mettle within his venerable tradition by finding an original way in which to subvert it.

It was therefore interesting and richly rewarding to learn that Petrarch had a similar attitude to Dante, his famous predecessor. Although aware that nobody - not even he - could possibly think and write in Trecento Italy without responding to Dante's work, Petrarch appears to have done his utmost to circumvent acknowledgment and conceal and code Dante's influence so as to reduce the visibility of his homage. Zygmunt Baranski and Theodore Cachey's book, based on a series of seminars given to celebrate the seventh centenary of Petrarch's birth, organized by the William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies, and held at the University of Notre Dame during the fall of 2004, to coincide with the visiting professorship of Baranski, is a delight to read. Contributors to this volume all presented at the seminar, and their ultimate goal - and therefore that of the book - was to move beyond the simple juxtaposition of 'Petrarch and Dante', which they thought was too often reduced to critically inert descriptions of the pervasive inter-discursive presence of 'Dante in Petrarca'.

According to Cachey ('Between Petrarch and Dante: Prolegomeon to a Critical Discourse'), the most important conclusion of the volume is that Petrarch ought to be considered within the tradition of the Trecento anti-dantismo. Petrarch's shift from Latin to the vernacular becomes especially evident after 1359, the date of the letter Familiares 21.15, 'To [End Page 197] Giovanni Boccaccio, a defense against an accusation by envious people', in which Petrarch famously claims never to have possessed a Commedia before Boccaccio sent him one copied in his own hand, and to have avoided reading Dante so as not to be unduly influenced by him. (This view seems to be in accordance with Petrarch's views on originality expressed elsewhere; in De Vita Solitaria, for example, he argues that a writer must be isolated in order to be original.) We learn also that, in his Canzoniere 189, which ended the first part of the Canzoniere in 1359, the very year in which the Familiares 21.15 letter was written, Petrarch mounts a subtle thematic war with Dante; that, in Triumph of Love, he subverts Dante's extraordinary and unprecedented theological claims for Beatrice (see Baranski, 'Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti'); and that, despite Petrarch's extensive knowledge of Dante, well-proven in scholarly literature, the only explicit mention of Dante auctor in all his works appears in a commentary on the work of Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, Chorografia, where Petrarch directly contradicts Dante's authority. It is this 'marginality and the overdetermined character' of Petrarch's attitude to Dante, which has largely escaped scholarly scrutiny, that is the backbone of the collection (pp. 8-11).

In her article, Sarah Sturm-Maddox argues that Petrarch, unlike Dante, traced his own literary identity back to the early humanists of Padua, especially Albertino Mussato, who had preceded him in obtaining the honour of the laurel crown. Cachey proposes influence by Cecco d'Ascoli, author of Acerba, who was known for his anti-dantismo and burned at the stake in 1327; the influences of Acerba on Il Canzoniere are many and well documented.

In other contributions, Teodolinda Barolini offers...

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