Voices of the Body. Liminal Grammar in Guido Cavalcanti's Rime. Voci del corpo. Grammatica liminale nelle Rime di Guido Cavalcanti (review)

In this monograph Federica Anichini collects the results of her studies on the thirteen-century Florentine author Guido Cavalcanti. Whereas Guido is traditionally considered by critics within the context of his intellectual influence on and his dispute with Dante Alighieri, Anichini focuses on his poetic production in the Rime. The present contribution demonstrates clearly how Cavalcanti was in a cultural minority, since he understands love in terms of an experience of the senses with the lover entangled in matter and collapsing into a condition of folly and blindness, which was counter to the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy who is granted the divine vision at the end of his journey.

According to Anichini, it is in his rhymes that Cavalcanti undermines the Dantesque theory of love. Voices of the Body looks at the so-called minor production, Cavalcanti's exiguous yet complex collection of Rime that accompany his celebrated canzone Donna me prega, a learned disquisition upon the causes, symptoms, and effects of love, and investigates Guido's rhetorical and linguistic experiments. In chapter I, "Guido Cavalcanti, or of Lightness and Subtlety", the author outlines how the tradition of the poet as an auctoritas developed along two lines: his character and his poetry. In fact, in addition to the collection of exegetic works produced around the canzone Donna me prega, she reveals that the most important sources for the creation of the legendary icon of Cavalcanti are on the one hand thirteen-century fictional and not-fictional works, Boccaccio's Decameron VI 9 and Florentine chronicles, and on the other Dante's oeuvre and Divine Comedy commentaries.

In the tradition of Cavalcanti studies, Boccaccio in the Decameron and Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani in their chronicles create the profile of an elusive yet crucial character by mentioning the same traits: "his solitariness and scornful attitude, his philosophical background and subtlety of thinking" [p. 14]. The recurrent allusions to Cavalcanti's works throughout the Dantesque corpus suggest that Dante, after the Vita Nova, intends to darken his former "primo amico" while working on the foundation of an authoritative vernacular canon pivoted on his own name. Yet, by looking at the body of Guido's work Anichini demonstrates how building an elusive character is Guido's own strategy, revealed in particular by the sonnet XVIII, "Noi siàn le triste penne isbigotite", in which he describes himself as a sequence of impalpable sighs.

The so-called minor rhymes, are thus the object of the investigation in chapter II, "Human Love in Darkness", together with Cavalcanti's major canzone Donna me prega. Significantly, Anichini argues for a comprehensive interpretation of Cavalcanti's work. While the Rime have their theoretical foundation in the canzone, the principle formulated in Donna me prega — that an individual is such based on his senses and that love is an experience restricted to the body — is tested in the minor rhymes by expanding the theme of the canzone and showing its phenomenology. In the same chapter, Anichini focuses on Cavalcanti's rhetorical quest for a language capable of expounding the human experience of love and outlines his affiliation with the philosophical current of thought of radical Aristotelianism. The study of the canzone is grounded in one of the most recent readings of Donna me prega in Maria Luisa Ardizzone's volume Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, which connects directly the canzone to its fourteenth-century interpretation by the Florentine doctor Dino Del Garbo. Anichini points out the consequences that Marsilio Ficino's distortion of the poem's meaning had upon later critical perception of Cavalcanti's text and outlines the evolution of medicine in the thirteenth-and fourteenth-century academic world, with specific reference to the links connecting medicine to other, theoretical subjects.¹ The Appendix includes a list of terms and passages from...