Petrarch’s Laura and the Critics

Ever since the time of Petrarch, Laura has been the object of various interpretations. Mapping these interpretations takes us through a rich and varied history. In the following, I will briefly comment on some central modern critics in the Italian and American traditions and discuss the hidden politics, intellectual ideologies and convictions inherent in their readings. Within this landscape, Giuseppe Mazzotta’s highly original interpretations have prepared the ground for a new direction in the reception of Petrarch.

From the very beginning, Petrarch’s readers, such as Boccaccio and later the humanists of the fifteenth century, regarded Laura as a fictional figure or an allegory. Petrarch, for his part, maintained her reality. In a famous letter to his friend Giacomo Colonna, the Bishop of Lombez, who had suggested that Laura was nothing more than an allegory of the poetic laurel, Petrarch writes:

In hoc uno vere utinam iocareris; simulatio esset utinam et non furor! Sed, crede michi, nemo sine magno labore diu simulat; laborare autem gratis, ut insanus videaris, insania summa est. Adde quod egritudinem gestibus imitari bene valentes possumus, verum pallorem simulare non possumus. Tibi pallor, tibi labor meus notus est; itaque magis vereor ne tua illa festivitate socratica, quam yroniam vocant, quo in genere nec Socrati quidem cedis, morbo meo insultes

(Fam. 2:9.19).

In other words, Petrarch insisted that his love was real as he repeatedly linked his literary universe to personal experiences. This insistence has created an endless series of biographies about Petrarch. Because we can follow him almost from one day to the next through his letters and treatises, poems and dialogues, his life seems to be one of the most portrayed in the history of literature—and this portrayal has not yet ceased. But the fictional character of his texts has greatly challenged Petrarch’s biographers. As for Laura, very little can be related to historical facts, and the crucial givens linked to her are obviously invented. Most critics, even within the biographical and philological traditions, have therefore tended to read her as an allegory, or as in Umberto Bosco’s description:

quell’amore è nient’altro che il mezzo di cui il Petrarca si serve per concretizzare liricamente la complessità dei suoi sentimenti, il centro fantastico a cui fa convergere le linee fluttuanti di stati d’animo contraddittori.¹

Philological criticism, which is still very strong, especially in Italy, seems to have developed from a need to render a more correct picture of Petrarch’s intellectual as well as personal biography. For example, Giuseppe Billanovich has attempted in an article on Petrarch’s Mont Ventoux letter to “ricompor[re] una diversa, più vera e più profonda” bibliography of Petrarch.² He does this by looking at other sources, such as the marginalia and the glosses rather than at the letter itself. Historians, philologists and classicists, such as Vittorio Rossi, Francisco Rico, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Hans Baron and more recently Marco Santagata and Vincio Pacca, have followed the same approach, using established methods of textual scholarship to incorporate Petrarch’s work into a coherent picture of his life. Accordingly, these scholars do not much differ from the more traditional biographers with their underlying notion of a consistent, objectified self, a self that can be grasped across time and space, and which involves a link between authorship and identity. Perhaps this biographical tradition is so strong in Italy because of the heroic and Romantic spirit of De Sanctis, the rhetoric of the Risorgimento and the idea of art as part of lived experience, which still hovers over Italian academic life?

The modern American tradition, however, has turned away from questions about the truthfulness of the texts and their correct dates of composition and has instead focused on Petrarch’s poetics. As a result, new interpretations of Laura have emerged, of course still mirroring by necessity the interpreters’ intellectual convictions. I shall briefly dwell upon three critics—John Freccero, Thomas Greene and Giuseppe Mazzotta—who have been of decisive importance, but who also, I believe, represent different and even opposite positions.

In an article from 1975, John Freccero started a debate...