Petrarch by Nicholas Mann (review)

REVIEWS Anselm's De concordia in The Testament of Love), but the scholarly methods which he has brought to bear on Chaucer's work certainly com­ mand respect. Much credit is due to Machan for having produced the most substantial study yet published of a much-neglected and misrepresented work. Techniques of Translation is a pleasing first book by a highly promising young medievalist. A.J. MINNIS University of Bristol NICHOLAS MANN. Petrarch. Past Masters Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 121. £7.95, $12.95. Petrarch remains for many the least accessible of the "three crowns of Florence." His self-consciousness may be more "modern" than Dante's or Boccaccio's, but it can also seem chillier and more obsessive; and his lack of-indeed, contempt for-the "common touch" in the use of the ver­ nacular also makes him less immediately attractive than either of them. One of the many admirable features of Mann's book is that it does not seek to gloss over such aspects; indeed, it contrives to relate them persuasively to some of the major energies and tensions of the poet's nature. The Petrarch that thus emerges in this brief but incisive introductory portrait is an impressively if elusively paradoxical figure, and, as Mann concludes, "Ifin the end we do not know what kind of a man he was, we can see what kind of a man he wished himself to be." Mann's survey covers a wide range of Petrarch's discursive prose, as well as the vernacular and Latin poetry, to establish a firm sense of three main features of the writer's identity: as scholar, poet, and moralist. Three of the book's seven chapters focus specifically on these features, but we are also made aware of the fluctuating relationship between them-reflected, for instance, in the tensions ofthe Canzoniere and the debate between writer and moralist in the Secretum. Petrarch's acute consciousness ofthe development as well as the tensions in his work is evident in a variety of forms, and some of these may, in passing, remind us of how strikingly unlike Chaucer he was. For instance, the care he took in revising and editing his work (including the letters) amounts almost to "image management" and is certainly far distant from 229 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the easygoing attitude of Chaucer, who, as one textual critic was recently moved to complain, "did not look after his papers with the care we might have expected." His obsession with glory and awareness of posterity, moreover, go far beyond the kind of poetic self-consciousness evident in, says, The House ofFame and work through the blending of fiction with fact to create an impression of what Mann in his penultimate chapter heading calls "the life as work of art." The book is generally much more scrupulous in its characterization of Petrarch's "modern" features than the dust-jacket blurb suggestsalthough there are one or two moments when the modern analogies used to describe what Mann calls "the real world of fourteenth-century politics" tend towards oversimplification. It may not, perhaps, be too misleading in this context to call Cola di Rienzo's revival of the Roman Republic in 1347 "strangely proto-Fascist," but it certainly makes no real sense, I think, to identify the Florentine White and Black Guelfs earlier in the century as, respectively, "conservatives" and "radicals." A work of this scale cannot, of course, give much close attention to historical context or even to a poet's more immediate literary inheritance and legacy. Nonetheless, Mann's recognition of Petrarch's ambivalent attitude towards Dante (echoing him, yet fearing to become an imitator) might well have been extended just a little further to consider some salient aspects of the relationship between these two poets, who together domi­ nate the Italian trecento and the later Middle Ages. Thus-to take exam­ ples oftopics Mann himself touches upon-some comparisons might be at least suggested between the Petrarchan and Dantean visions of Italy, the two poets' representations of Fortune (De remediis and Inferno 8), their attitudes toward their main classical masters (Cicero for Petrarch, Virgil for...