Lingua Indisciplinata : A Study of Transgressive Speech in the "Romance of the Rose" and the "Divine Comedy" [PhD diss]

334 Pages·2007·1.513 MB·English

by  Gabriella Ildiko Baika

LINGUA INDISCIPLINATA. A STUDY OF TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH IN THE
“ROMANCE OF THE ROSE” AND THE “DIVINE COMEDY”

by
Gabriella Ildiko Baika
BA, “Babes-Bolyai-University,” Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 1991
MA, “Babes-Bolyai-University,” Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 1992

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
the University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh,

2007
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

Gabriella Ildiko Baika

It was defended on
December 1, 2006
and approved by
Dissertation Advisor: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Department of French and Italian
Co-Advisor: Dennis Looney, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian
Diana Mériz, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian
Bruce Venarde, Associate Professor, Department of History

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Copyright © by Gabriella Ildiko Baika
2007
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LINGUA INDISCIPLINATA. A STUDY OF TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH IN THE
“ROMANCE OF THE ROSE” AND THE “DIVINE COMEDY”

Gabriella Baika, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2007

My dissertation is an investigation of the two masterpieces of medieval, allegorical
literature from the perspective of the Latin moral tradition of their time. Discussing Jean de
Meun and Dante’s obsessive concern with the sinfulness of speech, I relate the numerous verbal
transgressions treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy to what historians of
moral philosophy have called “the golden age of the sins of the tongue” (1190-1260), a time span
during which moralists, theologians and canonists wrote a great number of Latin texts on peccata
linguae. I argue that the radical inclusion of the sins of speech among the other classes of sins
treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy is to be accounted for in light of the
major thirteenth-century treatises on peccata linguae. While Jean de Meun, in the wake of Alain
of Lille, treats the sins of the tongue in a dispersed manner, without regard to a classification
based on the gravity of the sins, Dante follows a scholastic approach and assigns most of the sins
of tongue he is dealing with to the infernal area of Fraud, in a hierarchical order. Taking up
elements from William Peraldus's Summa vitiorum and Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica,
both very popular at the time, Dante constructs his own micro-system of peccata linguae, a
system within a system. Written shortly after the golden age of the sins of the tongue, the
Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy extend this cultural period and transfer the
preoccupation with sinfulness of human speech from the exclusive sphere of Latin moral tracts to
the realm of vernacular poetry.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE..................................................................................................................................VII
1.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
2.0 MEDIEVAL AUTHORITIES ON TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH........................15
2.1 PERALDUS’S EIGHTH “CAPITAL” VICE.................................................17
2.2 LAURENT D’ORLÉANS AND LES PECHIÉS DE LA LANGUE...............27
2.3 DOMENICO CAVALCA.................................................................................33
2.3.1 The Pungilingua (‘The Wounding Tongue’) ...........................................37
2.4 THOMAS AQUINAS AND THE SINS OF WORD.......................................45
3.0 FROM JEAN DE MEUN’S MULTIDISCURSIVE DISPERSAL TO DANTE’S
SYSTEM OF SINS......................................................................................................................54
3.1 ORIGIN, FUNCTIONS AND SINS OF SPEECH IN THE “ROMANCE OF
THE ROSE”........................................................................................................................55
3.1.1 Lady Reason on speech and its transgressions.........................................55
3.1.2 Nature on the (verbal) vices of humans....................................................71
3.1.3 Genius’s Grievances against Feminine Speech........................................82
3.2 DANTE’S MORAL APPROACH TO SPEECH............................................90
4.0 LINGUA DOLOSA (‘THE GUILEFUL TONGUE’): SPEAKING UNDER THE
SIGN OF FRAUD.....................................................................................................................113
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4.1 FLATTERY AS FORM OF TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH........................115
4.1.1 The art of losange in the Rose..................................................................120
4.1.2 Ornaments of speech: seduction and flattery in Canto XVIII of the
Inferno .....................................................................................................................128
4.2 EVIL COUNSELING, OR WHAT THE OLD WOMAN AND FRIEND
HAVE IN COMMON WITH ULYSSES AND GUIDO DA MONTEFELTRO........142
4.2.1 The Lover’s evil counselors......................................................................142
4.2.2 The name of the sin: medieval moralists on pravum consilium and
Ulysses and Guido’s sin...........................................................................................157
4.3 ‘DOUBLE-TALK’ (BILINGUIUM) IN FAUS SEMBLANT’S DISCOURSE
...........................................................................................................................187
4.4 SOWING OF DISCORD AND FALSIFYING OF WORDS: TWO VERBAL
SINS ASSOCIATED WITH FRAUD IN DANTE’S INFERNO..................................209
4.4.1 The seminator di scandalo e di scisma......................................................210
4.4.2 The verbal falsador...................................................................................226
5.0 DISTORTING THE VERTICAL DIMENSION: THE PROBLEM OF
BLASPHEMY...........................................................................................................................244
5.1 THE “BLASPHEMIES” OF JEAN DE MEUN...........................................246
5.2 THE SIN OF BLASPHEMY IN DANTE......................................................270
CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................................................301
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................307

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PREFACE
I am first deeply indebted (and grateful) to Professor Yves Citton, our former director of
graduate studies, to whom I owe my presence here. His guidance during the first years of my
Ph.D. program was invaluable, and I could not think of a more fitting hommage to him than this
dissertation.
I also owe many sincere thanks to my two dissertation directors, Professor Renate
Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Professor Dennis Looney, not only for kindly accepting to direct my
work, but also for their constant support throughout these five years. I could not be what I am
today as a “medievalist” without what they have taught me. Professionally, the things I have
learned from two of the finest medievalists in the United States are today my most cherished
treasure. On a more personal level, the words fail me when I try to recall all the efforts and
dedication Dr. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski invested in our relationship. Without her, I would
not have gotten so far.
I am also grateful to my dantisti friends, Dr. Marino Balducci and Dr. Massimo
Seriacopi, for my Italian scholarship and our long discussions on Dante hermeneutics, at the
Carla Rossi Academy and the Società Dantesca Italiana. Professors Franca Petrucci Nardelli and
Armando Petrucci, with whom I had the unique opportunity to work at the Newberry Library in
Chicago, have also contributed to this dissertation, by giving me the knowledge and confidence
necessary for approaching medieval manuscripts. In terms of scholarships, I have been extremely
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fortunate, as I have benefited from three one-year research fellowships, generously granted by
the University of Pittsburgh.
The credit for my doctoral work must also go to the Medieval Academy of America,
whose grant has represented for me an extraordinary morale booster and has given me the
opportunity to finalize my work in European archives.
I would also like to thank my wonderful parents, for their unconditional patience, love
and support, and last, but not least, to my beautiful daughter Mary-Annick, the true “rationale”
behind my work. This Ph.D. dissertation is as much mine as it is theirs.

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1.0 INTRODUCTION
As early as the fifteenth century, critical readers of the Romance of the Rose and the
Divine Comedy likened the two poetic narratives, discovering analogies between them and listing
a common concern with human vices as first among the poem’s many striking similarities.
Christine de Pizan and Laurent de Premierfait were the first to comment upon the two medieval
allegorical poems from a comparative point of view, thus pioneering a tradition that would
extend to the present day, a tradition of associating the Rose and the Comedy from various
viewpoints and using the poems as illustrations of specific aspects related to the Middle Ages.1
The year 1878 marked a turning point in this comparative tradition with the discovery of
the Fiore and the Detto d’Amore, two thirteenth-century Italian translations of the Romance of
the Rose. Gianfranco Contini and Luigi Vanossi credited Dante Alighieri with penning the Fiore,
an authorship that would represent the irrefutable piece of evidence for both Dante’s familiarity
with the Rose and the influence of the French narrative on the Comedy.2 By providing the

1 For an outline of the history of these comparative attempts, see Earl J. Richards’ book Dante and the “Roman de la
Rose.” An Investigation into the Vernacular Narrative Context of the “Commedia.” (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag,
1981), 71-81. An insightful comment on Christine de Pizan’s assessment of the French and Italian poets is provided
by Sylvia Huot, “Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun and Dante,” in Romance Notes, 25
(1985), 361-373.
2 See Gianfranco Contini, “Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie Roman de la Rose-Fiore-Divina Commedia,”
in Un’idea di Dante, (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2001), 245-283. For Luigi Vanossi, see Dante e il “Roman de la Rose”:
Saggio sul “Fiore” (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1979). The question of the authorship of the Fiore has been reopened
by Zygmunt Baránski and Patrick Boyde in: The Fiore in Context. Dante, France and Tuscany (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). The most recent findings and standpoints with respect to the Fiore as a work
attributable to Dante have been reunited by Johannes Bartuschat and Luciano Rossi in Studi sul canone letterario del
Trecento: Per Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 2003).
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“missing link” in the circular chain from the Rose to the Comedy, the hypothesis of Dante’s
authorship of the Fiore —which, in fact, has remained until now a controversial issue in Dante
studies—would validate the theories about the kinship between the Romance of the Rose and the
Divine Comedy.
What is striking, however, in the critical studies likening the Divine Comedy to the
Romance of the Rose is that among so many common aspects taken into consideration by
scholars throughout time, aspects ranging from astronomy to mythology, poetics and scholastic
philosophy, the common concern with vices noted by de Pizan and de Premierfait, in the
fifteenth century, has not been investigated. We lack today a thorough and fundamental study
that examines the two allegorical poems from the viewpoint of moral theology, a branch of
medieval thought to which both Jean de Meun and Dante owed a great deal. Although the
denomination “medieval summae,” applied to both the second part of the Rose and the Comedy,
has become commonplace in literary criticism, this denomination is ordinarily left in a sphere of
indeterminacy. The term summa had, in medieval times, a rather broad spectrum of meanings;
the works of Vincent of Beauvais, who practiced this genre from multiple perspectives, best
exemplify this polysemy. According to the field of knowledge envisioned, the summa--the Latin
medieval term for the more modern coinage encyclopedia--could be naturale (when it dealt with
natural sciences), historiale (when it investigated the historical past), doctrinale (when it
considered the corpus of theological doctrines), and finally, morale, when it focused on the vices
and virtues of human beings.
In the wake of Christine de Pizan and Laurent de Premierfait’s remarks about Jean de
Meun and Dante’s common preoccupation with morality, I suggest that the Romance of the Rose

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