Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years (Proceedings of the British Academy)

347 Pages·2007·2.2 MB·English

by  Martin L. McLaughlin

Introduction
ONE OF THE OBJECTIVES behind the Petrarch conference at the British
Academy in November 2004 was to organise a gathering of British schol-
ars on the seventh centenary of the poet’s birth that explored ‘Petrarch in
Britain’, in the many meanings of that phrase, and not simply to dupli-
cate discussions taking place at the many conferences in Italy and else-
where during the centenary year of 2004. By coincidence there is a
distance of exactly thirty years between the sixth centenary of Petrarch’s
death (1974) and the seventh centenary of his birth,and this gap of three
decades allows us to see how far Petrarch studies have progressed since
the 1970s.In the mid-1970s the first pioneering studies of Nicholas Mann
appeared,often in Italian journals and conference proceedings (there was
no British conference on the humanist in 1974), as did the first complete
English translation of the Canzoniereof the twentieth century,by Robert
Durling (1976).Three decades later there is a substantial group of British
academics and translators who have taken the discussion of Petrarch fur-
ther,academics who are to be found not just in modern languages depart-
ments,as perhaps was the case in the 1970s,but also many in English (and
also Scottish) literature departments—as is evident in Section V of this
volume. Similarly, in terms of translations, considerable advances have
been made: Durling’s was to remain the only complete version of the
Canzoniere for twenty of those thirty years,but from 1995 to 2004 a further
four complete translations were published,as well as three major selections
of poems (discussed in the concluding chapter of this volume by Peter
Hainsworth).
Petrarch in Britain, then, both in the sense that the volume offers
reflections on the poet by academics and critics working in Britain, and
also in the more obvious sense of his legacy in British culture.The start-
ing point of the volume is the keynote lecture,given by Piero Boitani,one
of only two contributors who do not work in a university department in
the UK.He is a major authority on fourteenth-century English as well as
Italian literature, and is as often to be found in Britain and North
America as in Italy.His is the opening chapter also because of its subject
matter, a survey of Petrarch’s thoughts on the people he called ‘barbari
Proceedings ofthe British Academy146,1–6.© The British Academy 2007.
2 Introduction
Britanni’.Boitani charts the humanist’s changing view of those whom he
initially termed ‘timidissimi barbarorum’ and whom he criticised since
Britain was the home of Aristotelian logic. The chapter brings out
nuances in Petrarch’s views, especially his admiration for his bookish
English contemporary and correspondent, Richard de Bury, and his
growing admiration for English military superiority over the French. In
fact, by the time of Petrarch’s death, the two worlds of Humanism and
Aristotelianism were coming together, notably in the figure of Chaucer’s
Clerk, who was from the home of Aristotelian logic in Britain, but who
praises Petrarch the poet,and recounts the tale of Griselda largely based
on Petrarch’s Latin version of the last story of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
After this opening textual survey, the volume is divided into five fur-
ther sections. Section II, ‘Petrarch and the Self’, groups three chapters
dealing with an area where the humanist is credited with having taken a
huge step towards modernity. The chapter by Jennifer Petrie, ‘Petrarch
solitarius’,explores the tensions behind the poet’s praise of the solitary life,
notably the criticisms of it voiced by Augustinus in the Secretum.As often,
this opposition is left unresolved, and we are left with a more complex
picture of the humanist’s self-portrayal as solitarius. Zygmunt Baran´ski’s
‘The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch’s Epicurus and Averroës and the
Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia’ links back to
Boitani’s remarks on Petrarch’s detestation of logicians, and considers
Petrarch’s views on Epicurus and Averroës in the invective on ignorance in
order to reach an overall perspective on his mature views of the intellec-
tual life. Jonathan Usher’s ‘Petrarch’s Second (and Third) Death’, which
looks both backward to Petrie’s chapter on the solitary Petrarch and for-
ward to Chapter 5 (on the Africa), notes that his theory of secular fame
and the various stages of death,fame,time,and eternity are already pres-
ent in nuce in the early Latin elegy on his mother’s death.Usher documents
the way the Africa expands these reflections long before the Trionfi, and
shows how his epic ‘contaminates’ unexpected sources such as Boethius
and Sallust in exploring ideas of fame and the death of fame in monu-
ments and books. In particular, what changes is the idea of a ‘second
death’ which moves from its traditional Christian notion in Dante to
Petrarch’s more secular formula regarding the fleeting nature of fame.
Section III, ‘Petrarch in Dialogue’, examines the way Petrarch inter-
acted with some of his major sources in both key Latin works and in the
vernacular poetry. Francesca Galligan’s ‘Poets and Heroes in Petrarch’s
Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources’ brings to the fore the role of
Dante’s epic in Petrarch’s poem.The prominence of poet characters such
Introduction 3
as Ennius and Homer, and the link between poet and hero parallel the
role of poet characters such as Virgil and Statius in the Divina Commedia.
Enrico Santangelo continues the analysis of Dante in Petrarch in his
chapter, ‘Petrarch Reading Dante: The Ascent of Mont Ventoux
(Familiares 4. 1)’: he argues for a series of textual echoes particularly of
specific cantos of the Purgatorio in this highly allusive and important let-
ter.One major difference that emerges,though,is that Petrarch’s journey
up the mountain is circuitous,and culminates with the discovery of the
self and its divisions, whereas Dante’s is vertical, and leads to the con-
templation of the Deity beyond the self. On the vernacular front, John
Took’s ‘Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia:A Moment in the Pre-history of the
Canzoniere’charts the emergence of the distinct tone of Petrarchan lyric
from the dolce stil novo through the important filter of Cino da Pistoia:
the consonances between the latter’s lyrics and Petrarch’s explain the
warm homage to Cino at his death in Canzoniere 92,where the later poet
deliberately echoes Cino’s manner.
Section IV, ‘Petrarchism and Anti-Petrarchism in Italy’, is the first of
two sections dealing with Petrarch’s poetic legacy in the Renaissance,first
in Italy then in Britain.In ‘Petrarch and the Italian Reformation’,Abigail
Brundin unearths the discreet Reformation content inside the deeply
conformist structure of the Petrarchist sonnet, notably in the poems
Vittoria Colonna collected for another sympathetic spirit, Michelangelo.
Embracing the new spirit of salvation by faith alone,‘sola fide’,Colonna,
the reformed Petrarchist, feels only joy at her spiritual powerlessness,
unlike her predecessor. Her poems are seen to embody a gravitas unno-
ticed by modern readers. Hilary Gatti traces the more secular spirit of
Giordano Bruno’s Petrarchism in her chapter, ‘Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno’.
She sees Bruno’s originality residing in the fact that he brings his Italian
experience of the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan debate to Britain, con-
fronting the principal English Petrarchan poet of the time, Sir Philip
Sidney; and also in that Bruno considers the Petrarchan sonnet as a suit-
able vehicle for philosophical enquiry in the post-Copernican,infinite uni-
verse. Going further than Colonna in the previous chapter, here we see
Bruno portraying the Protestant Elizabeth as his spiritual sponsor, in
harmony with his dedication of the Gli eroici furori to Sir Philip Sidney.
Showing that Petrarch’s poems also lent themselves to lighter topics,
Diego Zancani’s ‘Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch’
seeks out the roots of Renaissance anti-Petrarchism, both in the
Canzoniere itself and particularly in burlesque poets around 1500 as well
as in the hilarious pseudo-erudite obscene commentaries of writers such
4 Introduction
as Doni.Letizia Panizza’s chapter,‘Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenth-
and Seventeenth-century Italy’, continues this analysis of the way the
original Petrarchan code and message could become distorted for other
purposes. She examines commentaries and rewritings of Petrarch’s
Canzoniere that gave Laura celebrity status,either by hyperbole or denigra-
tion or outright impersonation. These works which highlight the ambiva-
lence of Laura’s identity are part of a general questioning of the nature of
the love lyric,its remote language,and its moral codes in an era of reform.
Section V, ‘Petrarchism: English and Scottish Connections’, explores
the way Petrarch’s legacy was taken up in Britain, from the time of the
first Petrarchists,Wyatt and Surrey,to the early seventeenth century after
the Union of the Crowns.In ‘Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England’,
Michael Wyatt looks at some of the traces of Petrarch’s presence in
England at this time, moving from Ascham’s attack on Petrarch, to his
pupil Elizabeth Tudor’s translation of the first ninety lines of the Trionfo
dell’Eternità,to Harington’s rewriting of the Vita Solitaria.Once more,as
in Italy at the time,it is Petrarch’s versatility,and indeed elusiveness,that
allows so many different versions of the writer to circulate in the early
modern period. In ‘Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European
Petrarchism’, Stephen Clucas considers the Hekatompathia, the first
Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, as a useful diagnostic text for
investigating the status of imitation in late sixteenth-century Europe.
Clucas is primarily concerned with the variety of ways in which Watson
articulates the relationship between his poems and the originals, from
faithful,line-by-line renderings to various kinds of partial translation,to
centoni and paraphrase.Although nobody would dispute the importance
of Sidney’s poetry, Watson is actually a more typical product of English
Petrarchism, and worthy of further study. With John Roe’s ‘The Comedy
of Astrophil:Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’,we move
to consideration of one of the major English exponents of Petrarch’s
legacy. Despite his reputation as an anti-Petrarchan, much of Sidney’s
Astrophil andStellais positively influenced by Petrarch.However,one sig-
nificant difference between the two is Sidney’s sense of humour which
underpins a number of the poems in the sequence.He expands Petrarchan
antitheses beyond anything we find in the Canzoniere, or in later
Petrarchists, and in some poems he offers a witty critique of the Platonic
interpretations of Petrarch commentators such as Gesualdo; and there
is no final recantation on the part of Astrophil,as happens famously in
the last poem of the Canzoniere. In ‘Sidney, Spenser, and Political
Petrarchism’, Syrithe Pugh continues the discourse on Sidney and
Introduction 5
Spenser,arguing that the engagements of both poets with Petrarchism are
more serious, and indeed more political than traditional readings have
implied. In particular, the two poets follow Petrarch in condemning
desire, but not to display their contemptus mundi, but to articulate their
anxiety about the absolutist tendency of the Tudor monarchy, and its
social consequences.Spenser’s interest in Petrarch,starting with his trans-
lation of Petrarch’s Rime323,is more complex than Sidney’s,aware as he
is of Petrarch’s authority, especially as a model for creating a national
poetry. However, Spenser uses this model not to construct a sense of
nationhood in thrall to a monarch, but to create a counter-national
poetry whose authority is independent of political power.The final chap-
ter in this section, Ronnie Jack’s ‘Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance
Sonnet’, advances this discussion of poetry and nationhood by examin-
ing the Scottish Petrarchans both before and after 1603. In Scotland,
Petrarch is initially resisted as a model,in a court which looks more to the
(Petrarchist) poets of Scotland’s traditional ally, France. Once James VI
of Scotland becomes King of England and Scotland,the Scottish sonnet
becomes more anglicised,but also more Italianate,as the influence of the
Pléiade wanes and Petrarchism becomes the dominant lyrical influence.
Jack considers three Scottish poets who exemplify this development of the
Petrarchan sonnet, culminating in William Drummond of Hawthornden
who adopted a translation strategy that reflected his own concerns with
solitude,death,transience,and decay,and thus expanded the topical range
and stylistic invention of Scottish Petrarchism.
The final group of essays, in Section VI, ‘Petrarch and the Moderns:
Italy and Britain’, brings the two strands of the book, the Petrarchan
legacy in the two countries, up to the present time: two chapters are
devoted to Italy, and two chapters to Britain. Pamela Williams, in
‘Leopardi and Petrarch’, underlines Leopardi’s major engagement with
Petrarch,including his important commentary on the Canzoniere,and his
own Petrarchan poems, notably Alla sua donna, whose similarities and
differences with Petrarch’s Chiare, fresche e dolci acque (Canzoniere 126)
are explored here. Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two
poets is that they both are concerned with illusions without self-delusion.
Emmanuela Tandello’s chapter, ‘Between Tradition and Transgression:
Amelia Rosselli’s Petrarch’, brings the story of Petrarch and his Italian
successors into the twentieth century, examining the poet’s ‘ghostly’
presence in an unlikely place,Amelia Rosselli’s poetry,and in a generally
un-Petrarchan time, the twentieth century. Tandello sees Petrarch’s pres-
ence in lexical echoes, in the way the Canzoniere is allowed to dialogue
6 Introduction
with some of its later poetic paradigms, and in Rosselli’s use of classical
mythologemes also present in her predecessor in constructing her own
personal poetic myth. The last two chapters return to Britain. Martin
McLaughlin’s ‘Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch’docu-
ments the extraordinary enthusiasm for biographies of Petrarch in
Britain in the three-quarters of a century between 1775 and 1850. In the
late eighteenth century Petrarch was more popular in Britain than Dante,
but the rise of Romanticism and the influential success of Cary’s transla-
tion of the Comedy meant that Dante soon eclipsed his successor as far
as British taste was concerned. The chapter charts the growing critical
sophistication in the biographies and works on Petrarch, notably in
Foscolo’s four major essays on him in the 1820s, and in Walter Savage
Landor’s acute analysis in the 1840s. In the end, though, there would be
only two complete translations of the Canzoniere in the whole of the nine-
teenth century, whereas the number of English versions of the Comedy
rose to fifteen by 1900. In the final chapter, ‘Translating Petrarch’, a
recent translator of the poems, Peter Hainsworth, offers a survey of
Petrarch in English from the early Renaissance versions of Wyatt and
Surrey through to the twentieth century, when Durling’s 1976 transla-
tion—the first complete English translation since 1859—was finally
complemented by several others, including Hainsworth’s own. He
explains the rationale and problems behind his own versions and situates
these within the broader context of the British preference for the more
‘concrete’ poetry of Dante, Michelangelo, and Montale. This last com-
ment in a sense takes us back to our beginning,and mirrors a point made
in the opening chapter by Boitani: in his Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch
notes that one of the major differences between the French and the
English is that the former prefer words, the latter deeds; or, as Petrarch
has Edward III say in his reply to the French King, ‘Tibi verba placent,
michi facta relinque’.Despite that,the British engagement with Petrarch’s
words is,if anything,stronger than ever.
The Editors would like to thank Nicholas Mann and Joe Trapp for their
generous support of this Conference as part of the British Academy’s pro-
gramme of activities.The volume is dedicated to the memory of Joe Trapp.
The paper Professor Trapp gave at the conference, entitled ‘Petrarch’s
Canzoniere’, is now a chapter in a posthumous volume of his, entitled
Illustrations of Petrarch:An Iconographic Survey(forthcoming).
PETERHAINSWORTH,MARTINMCLAUGHLIN,
andLETIZIAPANIZZA
1
Petrarch and the ‘barbari Britanni’
PIERO BOITANI
THEMOSTTIMIDAMONGTHEBARBARIANS,omnium barbarorum timidissimi:
this is how Petrarch described the English in his letter of 27 February
1361 to Pierre Bersuire, Prior of Saint Eloi in Paris, encyclopaedist,
moraliser-allegorist of Ovid and translator of Livy.1Bersuire in fact died
before the letter ever reached him but, had he managed to read it, he
would have found a sorry account of changing fortune, with particular
regard to the situation in France at the time. When he was a teenager,
wrote Petrarch, the Britons, whom they call ‘Angli’or ‘Anglici’, were the
most timid among the barbarians: ‘now a fiercely warmongering people,
they have defeated the Gauls, themselves renowned for war glories, with
such unexpected successes that—although unable to conquer the vile
Scots—not only have they treated the King of France shamefully and
despicably—the thought of which does not fail to bring tears to my
eyes—but they have also subjected the entire kingdom to steel and fire’.
Here Petrarch is alluding to the Hundred Years War, and in particu-
lar to the resounding English victories on French soil:in 1343,Edward III
had landed in Normandy,advancing as far as Paris;in 1346,Philip VI of
Valois had been defeated at Crécy, and the following year Edward III
had conquered the Fort at Calais. While the English showed themselves
to be unequal to the vile Scots (‘vilibus Scotis’)—losing the Battle of
Bannockburn in 1314 and thereby ensuring several hundred years of
Scotland’s independence—in France they left behind the ‘sad traces’and
‘horrific scars’ of the French losses: in 1356, in Poitiers (the city of
1Familiares22.14,1–2.My own English versions of Petrarch’s letters are based on the texts of
Francesco Petrarca,Opere(Florence,1975),I;F.Petrarca,Epistole,ed.Ugo Dotti (Turin,1978);
Pétrarque,Lettres Familières(Paris,2002);Seniles1–9,in Pétrarque,Lettres de la vieillesse,crit-
ical edition by E.Nota (Paris,2002);for the other books of the Seniles,Francisci Petrarchae
Opera Omnia(Basle,1554).For all the texts cited in the first part ofthis chapter,and their place
in Petrarch’s intellectual development,see the authoritative work by Francisco Rico,Vida u obra
de Petrarca,vol.I:Lectura del Secretum (Padua,1974).
Proceedings ofthe British Academy146,9–25.© The British Academy 2007.
10 Piero Boitani
Bersuire’s birth),the son of Edward III,Edward the ‘Black Prince’,won a
resounding victory over the French King John the Good, who was taken
captive and held prisoner in London until France paid a huge ransomfor
his release.
Petrarch was greatly disturbed by this unceasing conflict and by the
devastation inflicted upon French soil by those who had once been the
most timid among the barbarians: he had referred to them in a letter to
Stefano Colonna in 1352,2 and was to do so again in another letter
towards the end of 1367 or early in 1368 to Guido Sette.3 In the former
he writes,echoing Solinus:4
The whole of France and that Britain which lies at the edge of our world,or
rather beyond it,are destroying each other with heavy,reciprocal warfare [...]
Who could have predicted that the King ofFrance would live,and perhaps even
die,in an English prison? But now we are certain ofhis imprisonment,and have
a foreboding of his death. Who could have foreseen that the English army
would reach the gates of Paris? But it did, although no one is so ignorant of
human events as to be surprised by a king’s imprisonment or a siege upon a
city.5
In his Seniles, on the other hand, he concentrates on the effects the
English invasion has on culture, the academy, and scholarship. ‘Where’,
he asks,
is the Paris of the past which, although lesser than its reputation and clearly
indebted to the falsehoods of its inhabitants, was nonetheless of considerable
stature? Where are the battalions of students,the fervour of study,the riches of
its citizens,the general joy? One no longer hears the din of its disputations,only
the roar of battles; no longer visible are the heaps of books, only piles of
weapons.No syllogisms,no discourses are to be heard,only the cry ofsentinels.6
* * *
Yet Petrarch had likened Paris to England in barbarity.He could not bear
the dialectics which flourished at the Sorbonne and in Oxford,that empty
argumentation which deals not with the real problems of humankind but
only with words;relying on the mechanisms of mere logic,ignoring truth.
These so-called philosophers, says Petrarch, have reduced even theology
to dialectics, the highest speculations to problems of terms, formal dis-
2Familiares15.7,16–17,possibly revised in 1356.
3Seniles10.2,33 ff.
4Solinus,Collectanea22.1.
5Familiares15.7,17.
6Seniles10.2,33.
PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’ 11
cussions:‘those who usurped a most noble name and professed themselves
masters of theology, see how lowly they have fallen: from theologians to
logicians and alas sophists [ex theologis dyalectici atque utinam non
sophiste]; since they neither love nor know God, neither do they want to
know or love him;it is enough for them to appear to do so’.7Later,in the
Seniles, he calls dialectics the nauseating disease from Paris and Oxford
which has already destroyed a thousand minds (stomachosum illud ‘ergo’
Parisiense et Oxoniense, quod mille iam destruxit ingenia).8 In a letter to
Boccaccio,of 28 August,probably 1364,he declares in a fit of anger and
bad temper that in their day there had appeared ‘quibblers [dialecticuli],
not only ignorant but demented who, like an army of black ants swarm-
ing forth from the entrails of some rotten oak, rush to destroy all those
fields where superior learning flourishes’. They, he adds, disparage Plato
and Aristotle and laugh at Socrates and Pythagoras.He cannot even bring
himself to give a name to such people,and indeed they have never received
one by his works!9It was Leonardo Bruni who later revealed their identity
with crushing irony when he wrote that leading the attack against dialec-
tics,the supposedly noble art of disputation,‘is that barbarity which lives
across the Ocean’.‘What a people’,exclaims Bruni,‘already so dreadful in
name, Farabrich, Buser, Occam, and so forth, that they all seem to have
emerged from the ranks of Radamanthus.’ He asks Coluccio Salutati:
‘What is there, Coluccio, in dialectics, that has been left unturned by the
sophisms of the Britons?’10 At the end of the fifteenth century, his ironic
comment had become, according to Garin, a commonplace: quid cum
Britannis,quorum nomina ipso sono horrenda sunt?,wrote Antonio Ferrari
(Il Galateo) in a letter to Ermolao Barbaro.11And the name ‘Swineshead’
certainly provided him with some justification.
Petrarch is never quite so harsh, but he deploys a similarly cutting
irony when he wants to poke fun at the ‘barbarian Britons’, unrivalled
masters of formal logic. In an epistle to Tommaso Caloiro da Messina,
presumably of 12 March 1351, Petrarch refers to a letter from his friend
7Familiares16.14,12.See E.Garin,‘La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del 300 e i “bar-
bari britanni”’,in L’età nuova(Naples,1969),pp.141–66,here p.151.Garin’s title and article
provided the inspiration for the present chapter.
8Seniles12.2,in Opera Omnia,p.912.
9Seniles5.2,29–30.
10Prosatori latini del Quattrocento,ed.E.Garin (Milan–Naples,1952),pp.58–61.Some codices
have Suiset ((cid:2)Swineshead) in place of Occam. Buser stands for Entisber ((cid:2)Heytesbury): see
Garin,‘La cultura fiorentina’,pp.151–2.
11Garin,‘La cultura fiorentina’,p.152.and see F.Rico,Nebrija frente a los bárbaros:El canon
de gramáticos nefastos en las polémicas del humanismo(Salamanca,1978).