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2. Petrarchan Totems and Political Taboos
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Petrarch’s ambivalent attitude toward Rome as both a mental construction and a geographical site finds a forceful expression in Familiares 15.3, written at Vaucluse in February 1353, a few months before his final departure for Italy. An irresistible urge to leave southern France had seized him, despite reports that it would not be safe or wise to do so.1 On the verge of reclaiming his Italian identity yet forced to remain in Provence, Petrarch writes that physical location seems immaterial: Vaucluse embraces Rome and Athens as a site where he may best communicate with his friends and ancient writers.2 Here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland [patriam]; here I gather all the friends I have or did have . . . from every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air (2.256‒57/844‒45). Even as he writes, however, he seems ready to leave Vaucluse , his spiritual fatherland, to possess the soil of Italy, the land of his mother tongue. Petrarch’s attitude toward Florence, the birthplace of his forefathers, is likewise ambivalent. Although its literary language fuels his Rime sparse, the city of his parentage represents strife-torn factionalism. It has conferred upon him an exilic identity that he now wishes to redeem from its Guelph victors, who had driven out his father. Related to Florence by a bond of culture and ancestry , he nonetheless shuns it because of the crime it has committed against his family. It acquires totemic status as a figure of ancestral origin from which he might have expected to receive care and protection but has instead suffered 37 Petrarchan Totems and Political Taboos 2 deep pain. Hostile toward it, fearful of it, he displaces his unappeased longings on to other sites in northern Italy. In Totem and Taboo Freud describes such ambivalence, the simultaneous existence of love and hate toward the same paternal object, as matter for a social psychology focused on the interplay of religion, art, law, and other social and cultural institutions that arise from it. A sense of remorse from having felt antipathy toward this figure of origin generates a “deferred obedience” with creative and socially integrative consequences (13.143). The survivors of an ancestral violence who once banded together to subdue the latter now become rivals to acquire its power and patrimony. In order to avert a zero-sum struggle for possession, they have no choice but to agree upon a system for factoring its inheritance . Establishing a prohibition on such sexual practices as incest and wife stashing which confuse paternal bloodlines and inflame household rivalries , they form a fraternal clan linked by exogamic blood ties and economic alliances . The basis for their social and political reorganization rests upon sexual taboos. In coming to terms with the conditions of his exile, Petrarch targeted his attention to compensatory sites in northern Italy. What he did not expect was the degree of internecine strife and fraternal rivalry that he found there. Conflicts between Guelphs and Ghibellines had racked most of the area, but by 1277 the Visconti family had come to power in Milan, and within a few generations it controlled Lombardy.3 The aftermath of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century brought great unrest throughout Italy, notably in Cola di Rienzo’s renewed disturbances at Rome and in a war between Venice and Genoa which broke out in 1352.4 Still, Petrarch took his permanent departure from Vaucluse for Italy in late May 1353. He well knew that Giovanni Visconti’s aspirations to dynastic absolutism in Milan represented the antithesis of republican liberty prized at least by lip service in Florence, but he assented to Viscontian sovereignty in exchange for patronage. At least some of his bad faith in having done so emerges in the confessional Secretum.5 Other indications emerge in his collected letters. In Familiares 17.10, dated 1 January 1354, Petrarch recounts the struggle within his conscience, “the monstrousness [monstrum] of my spirit,” in terms of a Pauline depravity of will and Augustinian perplexity of desire, “that I may not want wholly what I wish in part and, unless I am mistaken, what I desire to will fully” (3.34/954).6 The letter resonates with Petrarch’s awareness of compromising his libertas. The word certainly implies the writer’s professional freePetrarch...